How “Progressives” Got The Khmer Rouge So Wrong

Milton Osborne is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Lowy Institute and the author of ten books on the history and politics of Southeast Asia. His long association with Cambodia began in 1959 when he was posted to the Australian Embassy, Phnom Penh. In 1980 and 1981, Milton Osborne was a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in relation to the Cambodian refugee problem, working along the Thai-Cambodian border. In 1982 he returned to government service as Head of the Asia Branch of the Office of National Assessments, also serving for a year as Head of Current Intelligence. On Tuesday 24 March 2015, Milton Osborne addressed The Sydney Institute to review the history of the initial intellectual denial – from Australia’s Gough Whitlam to academic specialists in south-east Asian politics – over Cambodia’s “killing fields”.

HOW “PROGRESSIVES” GOT THE KHMER ROUGE SO WRONG

MILTON OSBORNE

In a period when anniversaries of major events are constantly remembered – the Great War, The Gallipoli Campaign, the bombing of Dresden – another anniversary falls due next month which seems less likely to garner the attention it deserves. This is the event that took place 40 years ago on 17 April 1975, when the victorious Khmer Rouge forces marched into Phnom Penh and the bitter Cambodia civil war that had raged since 1970 came to an end.

The war came to an end but the savagery of the Khmer Rouge regime began. In the course of three years, eight months and twenty days somewhere between 1.75 and two million Cambodians died who otherwise would have lived. They died as the result of executions, an almost total lack of modern medical care, and terrible patterns of overwork in vast, poorly-conceived agricultural cooperatives. We do not know exact figures for those who died by execution but a total of 200,000 or even 500,000 is not an impossible estimation. These extraordinary figures are justified by the evidence available from surveys of particular regions within Cambodia where in some instances as many as 66 per cent of a population group were executed. The overall figures for loss of life between April 1975 and January 1979, which nowadays only the most purblind will dispute, mean that somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of Cambodia’s 1975 population died while Pol Pot and his associates were in power.

Though, as I will argue, there was ample, early evidence of the awfulness that was taking place while Pol Pot and Angka, the “organisation”, ruled, it was not until after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, beginning in late 1978 and essentially completed in early January 1979, that we learnt of the existence of S-21, the Tuol Sleng extermination centre located in the buildings of a former high school in Phnom Penh’s suburbs. Established around the middle of 1976, S-21 (“S” standing for sala or “hall”, “21” was the Khmer Rouge codename for the santebal, the regimes ‘secret police’) was a secret prison whose existence was unknown to the rest of Cambodia’s unfortunate population because almost no one who entered it emerged alive. To enter S-21 was to be presumed guilty, never mind that the institution had the motto over its door, “Fortify the Spirit of the Revolution”. Because of the meticulous records kept by the jailors and torturers in S-21 we know that at least 14,000 persons were incarcerated, tortured until they “confessed” to their crimes against the state, and then executed. After the grounds around the prison were full of the bodies of executed prisoners a new execution site was selected at Choeng Ek, the “Killing Fields” that have become a tourist site for visitors to Phnom Penh. Research by a French scholar, Henri Locard, suggests that there were other provincial prisons just as awful as S-21, but it still too soon to estimate the cost in lives of those unfortunate enough to be incarcerated in these.

The anniversary has been in my mind for many reasons. This is partly because over the past year I have been concerned to provide my daughter with some written material about my life – in effect a long letter to my daughter, and this has included my criticism of those in academia who failed the most basic tests of objectivity in relation to events in Cambodia. And then, most recently, I was struck by Gerard Henderson’s reference to the public support given by senior members of the ALP in 1978 to “the national liberation struggles of both Vietnam and Kampuchea”, and to Gough Whitlam’s statement in the same year that he doubted “all the stories that appear in the newspapers about the treatment of people in Cambodia”. I say “struck” because I was living outside of Australia from late 1971 until early 1979 and my knowledge of the domestic politics of this period is very patchy.

I had and have a deep personal interest in the events that followed the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975 and its aftermath for many reasons. So in no sense am I a disinterested commentator on the tragedies that followed that victory. In 1959, almost exactly sixteen years before Pol Pot and his associates came to power, I was posted to the Australia embassy in Phnom Penh as a young diplomat (in fact at that stage the mission was officially a legation; it was raised to embassy status in November 1959). This was a posting that has had a major effect on the rest of my life. Aged twenty-two when I arrived in Phnom Penh, I found myself in a city and country marked both by Cambodia’s own exotic political culture and a remarkable overlay, at the elite level at least, of France in the Orient – an overlay stemming from some 90 years of France’s colonial presence.

By the time I had spent more than two years in Cambodia during my posting I realised that I wanted to know more about the country’s history, and more broadly of what had been “French Indochin”, a colonial political grouping that included Vietnam and Laos. This eventually led to my becoming a graduate student at Cornell and, in 1965-66, to an extended period of dissertation research in Paris, Phnom Penh and Saigon. After my time at Cornell had concluded in 1967 I continued to visit Cambodia each year, only ceasing after 1971 when travel outside of Phnom Penh became very difficult.

Both during my diplomatic posting, and later, as an over-aged and underpaid graduate student, I had the good fortune to make a number of close friends in Cambodia. What happened to some of these friends after April 1975 is fundamental to my feelings about those who either became advocates for the Pol Pot regime while it was in power between 1975 and 1979 or who, if not advocates, were ready to dismiss the evidence abundantly apparent of the awfulness of the regime.

I have written about the fate of some of my friends in my book Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy, published in 1979, so I will be brief in speaking of them now – and there were other friends who disappeared after April 1975 about whose fate I know nothing. They simply vanished. My closest friend, Prince Sisowath Phanderavong, is still alive today because he was living in Bangkok at the time the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. This was not the case for those of my other good friends about whose fate I have information: Phandaravong’s father, Prince Sisowath Entaravong and his wife, Colonel Kim Kosal, and Monsignor Paulus Tep Im Sotha.

Sisowath Entaravong, who had proved to be an invaluable source of information about Cambodia’s royal family in 1966, and his wife were driven out of Phnom Penh in the days immediately following the Khmer Rouge victory in that remarkably callous decision taken to empty the city. Somewhere south of Phnom Penh they fell by the wayside and were never seen again. They were just two of the estimated 10,000 who died in this cruelly imposed exodus – it is an event to which I will return.

My friendship with Colonel Kim Kosal began in 1959 and continued when I returned to Cambodia in 1966. It was a friendship that even extended to his inviting me in that later year to spend a weekend on the army base he commanded on Cambodia’s sensitive border with Vietnam. He was an apolitical soldier who could have left Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge victory. He stayed because he believed it was his duty to do so. He was killed in the days immediately after the Pol Pot force marched into Phnom Penh, probably beheaded along with other senior figures in the area once occupied by the Cercle Sportif, the area where the American embassy is now located. In killing people closely associated with the Phnom Penh government the victims received, in the words of Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge chief of state, their deservedly ‘cruel punishment’.

Monsignor Tep Im, who had proven a wonderful intellectual companion after I met him in Phnom Penh in 1966, and as I visited Cambodia each subsequent year, was by 1971 Apostolic Prefect of the Battambang diocese, the region in Cambodia’s northwest. For reasons that are far from clear he survived without being detained for about ten days after the Khmer Rouge entered Battambang city. Even with the help of the Congregation of the Evangelisation of the Peoples (the former Propaganda Fide) of the Vatican, which I visited in 2008, I have not been able to add much to the information I recorded about his death in 1979. It is apparent that after finally being taken into custody by the Khmer Rouge and been told he would be allowed to leave Cambodia for Thailand he was forced from the vehicle supposedly taking him to freedom and shot down close to the Thai-Cambodian border.

What I have just recorded are individual tragedies, and it is a fair comment that each of these friends were, in their different ways, members of Cambodia’s elite. It is an equally a fair comment that members of Cambodia’s elite suffered disproportionately in terms of their loss of life at the beginning of the period while the Khmer Rouge ruled. Teachers and doctors became prime targets for elimination, and as has often been noted even to wear a pair of spectacles was to be seen as an intellectual and so to be eliminated. But this does mean that to be a peasant or low-level urban worker insured survival. By the time Pol Pot’s regime was overthrown it was apparent that loss of life through executions extended across the whole of Cambodia’s population. That this was the case received clear confirmation when I acted as a consultant for UNHCR in 1980 and 1981.

Starting in mid-1979, and accelerating through the final months of that year, tens of thousands of Cambodians flooded over the Thai- Cambodian border. They were seeking refuge from the chaotic conditions that developed following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that had defeated the Khmer Rouge. By the end of 1979 some 90,000 Cambodian refugees (technically from the point of view of the Thai government they were “illegal immigrants”) were housed in the largest of the camps established under UNHCR control at Khao I Dang, with smaller but still large numbers in other camps in Thailand to a total of some 175,000 refugees – this figure does not take into account the informal border agglomerations that existed just inside Cambodian territory for which UNHCR had no responsibility. This situation posed an enormous challenge to UNHCR, not least in terms of not knowing, in other than the broadest terms, why so many Cambodians had fled their homeland and under what conditions they might be ready to return. In association with these immediately “practical” questions it was apparent that the experience of refugees in relation to the loss of family members during the Pol Pot regime was playing some part in the attitudes refugees held towards the future. Because of my background of a long association with Cambodia I was asked, as a consultant, to address these issues.

I did so over three months through the means of an in-depth survey of 100 refugees in Khao I Dang and seven other camps. In constructing my survey sample I endeavoured to approximate the social structure that had existed in Cambodia before 1970 – that is, the survey was heavily weighted to reflect the preponderance of peasant farmers and fishermen (42 persons), unskilled urban workers (17 persons), with the remaining numbers made up of persons associated with business, the civil service, the armed services and students.

The full details of my survey are available in printed form and are too detailed to be repeated here. But in relation to the vexed issue of which group of Cambodians suffered under Pol Pot – was it “only” the bourgeoisie, as was sometimes suggested – my findings were clear. If the bourgeoisie were the main target, at least initially, the cost in lives across the whole of Cambodia’s population was staggering. Of the 100 refugees interviewed in depth no fewer than 40 had lost close (nuclear family) members through executions, to a total of 88 persons. Of these 40 persons, 27 were drawn from farmer-fishermen or low-level urban worker occupational backgrounds.

(The details of my survey may be found in my article, “The Indo-Chinese Refugee Situation: A Kampuchean Case Study”, in Charles A. Price, ed., Refugees: The Challenge of the Future, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Fourth Academy Symposium, 3-4 November 1980, Canberra, 31-68.)

What I have outlined is what we know now, and came to know rapidly after 1979. But matters were very different in the period immediately after the Khmer Rouge victory. The key events at that time were the forced exodus of Phnom Penh’s population from the country’s capital and the seclusion of all foreigners in the French embassy compound before they were transported out of the country at the end of April. This meant that from April 1975 onwards, and with the exception of a few foreign women married to Cambodians (for instance Laurence Picq who wrote of her experiences in her book, Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge), there were no resident foreign observers of developments within Cambodia – I stress resident, since later in the period of Khmer Rouge rule selected “friendly” parties of foreigners were brought into the country for carefully controlled visits.

For those who had opposed the Vietnam War, whether in the United States, Australia or elsewhere, the Khmer Rouge victory was a cause for praise, for to use William Shawcross’ memorable phrase Cambodia was a “sideshow” to Vietnam: if you opposed American involvement in Vietnam it was almost automatically the case that you opposed America’s involvement in Cambodia and then took the next step of approving of the new regime in power in Phnom Penh.

I took a different view. Critical though I was of much that took place in both Vietnam and Cambodia I never became an advocate for the Vietnamese or Cambodian communists. Not only was I aware of the brutality of the North Vietnamese regime in the post-Geneva Accords period in the northern half of the country, and then in the later hostilities that took place in both Vietnam and Cambodia. I had friends and acquaintances in both Cambodia and Vietnam. Indeed, in 1969 and 1970-71 I was a house guest of a senior South Vietnamese politician in Saigon for several weeks on two occasions. And being critical of aspects of the Vietnam War, and events in Cambodia, did not mean I was other than grateful for the assistance I received, both officially and unofficially, from the Australian army in Vietnam, particularly the Australian Army Training Team.

In the months after the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia, and then shortly after of the communists in Vietnam, I was deeply concerned to have news of what was happening in those countries. Watching events from outside Australia I became increasingly concerned as information began to circulate about developments in Cambodia post-April 1975. Central to my concern was the first major article to attempt a detailed account of what life was like in Cambodia, written by Henry Kamm of the New York Times and published on 15 July 1975–at that time I had not met Kamm and did not do so until 1980. Subsequently he has become a good friend.

Kamm’s front-page article runs to more than 60 column inches and is headed “Cambodian Refugees Tell of Revolutionary Upheaval: People who Fled Recently Report Wide Terror, Emptied Towns and Forced Labor of Millions Clearing Jungles”. It seems almost redundant now to quote in detail from the article, for what Kamm reported has now become so widely known: disruption of family life, friends or relatives called away by those in authority never to return, towns deserted, arbitrary killings and harsh labour conditions.

For supporters of the Khmer Rouge victory reports such as Kamm’s, and others that followed, were not to be trusted. Indeed, distrust of refugee accounts became a leitmotif of those, such as Laura Summers, an American academic then living in Britain, who wrote in favour of the new regime in Phnom Penh. The numbers of refugees who had made their way into Thailand by the second half of 1975 was in the thousands – at least 6,000 at the time Kamm wrote his article- – but this was not considered as sufficient to give a representative picture of life inside the country. After all, Laura Summers wrote,

Thus far, few Khmers have left the country and many of these are former officers from Lon Nol’s army or former civil servants who fear prosecution for wartime activities. No war crimes trials have, in fact, come to life, probably because the RGNU [Royal Government of National Union] decision to avoid deepening internal socio-political conflicts and bitterness at a time of reconstruction. – (“Consolidating the Revolution”, Current History, December 1975

It’s worth noting that Summers’ article takes no notice of the fact that Kamm’s informants were mostly peasants or low-level workers, or ordinary soldiers rather than officers. The assertion that there were no war crime trials betrays a fantasy expectation, as does the suggestion that the Royal Government of National Unity was actually still in existence.

By early 1976 there were other reports circulating of the brutality taking place in Cambodia. In February, for instance, François Ponchaud, who was later to published his important book, Cambodge année Zéro, was the author of a number of articles in Le Monde, in February 1976, recounting his own experiences and drawing on interviews that he had conducted with refugees who had fled from Cambodia. These interviews endorsed the picture already reported by Henry Kamm. Yet those in the academic community either remained silent or wrote like Laura Summers in praise of the supposed virtues of the new regime in Phnom Penh. And for any interested visitor to Bangkok it was easy to gain access to well-informed commentators, both Cambodian and foreign, who had horrendous accounts to give of developments in Cambodia.

It was at this stage, around March 1976, that I was asked by a Japanese journal, Pacific Community, to contribute an article on developments in Cambodia. Completed around the middle of 1976, the article was published in October of that year and I hope I may be forgiven for quoting from the article at some length:

No foreigner yet knows the full truth about developments in Cambodia; nor probably do many Cambodians. But the full truth is an elusive concept at the best of times even under ideal conditions, which are clearly not the circumstances in Cambodia in the second year following the defeat of Lon Nol’s forces. What has happened since then may never be clearly documented. Segments only of the overall picture are revealed with any clarity. Viewed discretely or taken as an incomplete assemblage these segments suggest a revolution of staggering proportions imposed harshly upon an already war-ravaged country. They suggest a resort to brutal methods that can only be explained by some deep and perhaps desperate fear that the revolution might be halted or even turned around. And they suggest that policy measures that might, in the abstract, be regarded as rational and desirable have been pursued in that terrible vacuum of unreality where the end justifies the means. It is difficult to use other descriptions for a situation in which there have been widespread killings of both former enemies and of those who had no clear links to the defeated regime, massive forced relocation of population, and a determination to attain food sufficiency at a human cost that can scarcely be comprehensible to those who are privileged to live in freer circumstances. There must be doubt about magnitudes. If, however, only ten per cent of the stories told by refugees fleeing Cambodia are correct the situation is of an awfulness that beggars description.

And I concluded the article by writing:

Throughout this article the need to recognise the inadequacies of our available information has been underlined. Few comments on developments can be made in an unqualified fashion, and there is a faint possibility that in some areas of the country, at least, the general picture of conditions accepted by foreign observers is less dark than is widely taken to be the case. There is even a less likely possibility that our general picture is wrong and that we have allowed ourselves to be swayed by over-publicised and deliberately distorted accounts of developments. If either of these possibilities should be borne out in fact the new rulers of Cambodia could justly claim to be the victims of an international smear campaign as calculated in falsehood as the concoction of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and as wilfully deliberate in its intent to mislead as any past exercise in black propaganda. But if this is not the case, then to remain silent in the face of developments in Cambodia is, for those who in the past have claimed to be knowledgeable about that country, a contemporary treason of the clerks.

But the “treason” only continued. And to my great regret some of the most egregious support for the supposed virtues of the Pol Pot regime came from people, in addition to Laura Summers, associated with the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, of which I had been a member. Probably the most ‘notable’ example of wilful disregard for reality was the short book written by Gareth Porter and George Hidebrand, with an approving Introduction from George Kahin, the long-time Director of the Program, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. The aim of the book was to explain and justify the forced exodus of Phnom Penh’s population. Relying almost entirely on press releases from the Pol Pot regime (referred to as “suppressed” documents and the regime’s “official” bulletins, and in the authors’ case never having visited Cambodia, they conjured up a picture of a beneficent regime slandered by the West generally and the United States in particular:

A careful examination of the facts regarding the evacuation of Cambodia’s cities thus shows that the description and interpretation of the move conveyed to the American public was an inexcusable distortion of reality. What was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced post war Cambodia. (Porter and Hildebrand, p.56)

Porter and Hildebrand discounted the observations of those who witnessed the exodus, such as New York Times correspondent, Sydney Shanberg. They made no reference to Kamm’s reporting and appear not to have been aware—as indeed I was also not aware at the time–of the material published by Father Ponchaud, first in La Croix in October 1975, and then in Le Monde, in February 1976, as already mentioned and which prefigured the detail he provided in his 1977 book, where he wrote of the forced exodus as follows:

… a hallucinatory spectacle: thousands of wounded and sick were leaving the city, the less seriously ill painfully dragging themselves along, others were carried by friends, while others still were being pushed along on their hospital beds by their families with their plasma and IV drips bumping alongside. I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet writhing along the ground like a cut worm. Or a weeping father carrying her ten-year-old daughter in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling. Or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing more than skin.

But aware or not of Ponchaud’s early published writings on the exodus from Phnom Penh, there were repeated refugee references available to which the sceptics could have turned. But over and again those who wrote in favour of the Pol Pot regime dismissed such evidence. In this regard I could go on, citing Ben Kiernan in Australia, Malcolm Caldwell in Britain, Jean Lacouture in France, and of course Wilfred Burchett and many others who continued through 1976 and 1977 to present a picture of events in Cambodia that bore no relation to reality. And then there was Noam Chomsky.

There is a thesis to be written about Noam Chomsky and the modern history of Cambodia. His scepticism about the toll of the Pol Pot regime’s murderous policies was cloaked in highlighting errors in reports and writings on events in Cambodia and an insistent claim that what was happening in Cambodia was the result of American policies, and in particular the covert US bombing campaign, Operation Menu. (I acknowledged the bombing campaign as a factor in shaping the success of the Khmer Rouge victory but I did not – despite Chomsky inserting the word, state that the American bombing campaign was “in large part”, his words, the reason for the Khmer Rouge use of terror. And importantly my comments in Before Kampuchea related to events before the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. (Chomsky in Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 March 1981, under the heading, “The Truth About Indochina”.)

I am at one with William Shawcross who commented on Chomsky in June 1981: “Chomsky’s position [on Cambodia] has been disastrous ever since the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. By continually concentrating on mistakes which journalists and writers have made and on the way in which western governments have exploited the stories out of Kampuchea, he has deflected attention from the far more important issue – whether or not gross abuses of human rights were being committed there.” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 June 1981).

Yet there is still the question of why so many commentators, particularly those with a claim to academic values, “got it wrong”? Leaving Chomsky aside, some of the most prominent supporters of the Khmer Rouge regime have acknowledged they were wrong and tried to explain their position. Ben Kiernan, for instance, writing in 1979 in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, stated, “I was wrong … the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1975 was not simply a grassroots reaction, and expression of popular outrage at the killing and destruction of the countryside by US bombs, although that helped it along decisively. There can be no doubt that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the population …”

He was attracted before coming to this conclusion by what he claimed to have seen as “the humanitarian socialist ideals of the Khmer Rouge”.

Gareth Porter was to say in 2010 in relation to his writings on the Khmer Rouge that, “I’ve been well aware for many years that I was guilty of intellectual arrogance. I was right about the bloodbath in Vietnam, so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia.” (Brinkley, Cambodia’s Curse, page 49)

Another view was heard in Australia as late as 1980 when Gavan McCormack, then at the ANU, continued to argue that the “truth about the Kampuchean revolution is extraordinarily difficult to discover . . . Till some time in 1978 the case against Kampuchea was of such a dubious nature that many socialists and progressive people refused to give it any credence. It is likely some fabrication/distortion of evidence is still going on, but in my view the balance of probability has now shifted heavily towards the view that the Kampuchean revolution between 1975 and the end of 1978 was a terrible travesty …” (Journal of Contemporary Asia, 10, 1980)

At least one of his fellow academic leftists was ready to say to me a year earlier, in what I took to be an acceptance of the awfulness that had occurred in Cambodia, “But why didn’t you tell us what was happening, Comrade?”

I don’t subscribe to the rubric that to understand all is to forgive all, but if one is seeking to explain how so many observers failed to approach Cambodia with an open mind it has to be in terms of their mind sets, whether as idealists or as older, committed believers in a vision of socialism that was automatically anti-American in form. The most dispiriting thing for me is that George Kahin, Director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, a charismatic teacher and a member of my PhD committee, should have strayed so far from the academic standards that I believed he held. In writing his approving introduction to Porter and Hildebrand’s book he was abandoning the standards that I had believed he had expected of his students. For he wrote his approving introduction with no regard for the contrary, factual evidence readily available that was in opposition to his position.

Whether in the case of Summers, Kahin, Porter, Hildebrand, Kernan or others, including the left wing press in France epitomised by the newspaper Libération, their readiness to discount refugee accounts of what was happening in Cambodia in favour of confected vision of some form of revolutionary utopia reflected at best unthinking fantasy and at worst unqualified intellectual arrogance.

As with Simon Schama’s observations about French apologists for the nature of the Terror in the French Revolution, they either were, or risked being, guilty of “intellectual cowardice and moral self-delusion”. In doing so, to quote Schama again, they contributed to “the scholarly normalisation of evil”. (Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.)