In memoriam
Allard K. Lowenstein,
of early Namibian commitment
Just after the signature of the so-called Peace Agreements on Cambodia, in Paris, on avenue Kléber where the 1973 Agreements on Vietnam were also signed, Roland Dumas, the French Foreign Minister, held a press conference, together with Prince Sihanouk and Mr Perez de Cuellar, the UN Secretary General. A nasty journalist, quoting directly from the UN Convention "on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide", a treaty to which France like a majority of other States is party, reminded the audience that, in the absence of an established ad hoc international court, each state was duty bound to act against the perpetrators of such a heinous crime. It was clear from the text that the French Government was bound to place Khieu Samphân and Son Sen, the Khmers Rouges signatories, under arrest and to charge them with the crime of genocide under international law.
The reply was what could be expected from a true statesman: he shrugged and laughed. "Do not worry", he said to the nasty journalist. "We have very good lawyers. (He is a famous lawyer himself.) It does not matter what documents we give them, they'll always come up with the solution [we want]." He was expressing the absolute cynicism of power: treaties are worth no more than the paper they are written on when they contradict the policy of the day. Referring to the law is just idle talk.
As I write this, sitting in a garden facing the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, the second Supreme National Council meeting is taking place inside. Seated there is the same Khieu Samphân, representative of what is left of the Pol Pot regime, overthrown in early 1979 by Vietnamese troops. He rode into the Palace protected by a strong military escort there is not much love for him in town. In the plane bringing him from Bangkok, he complained to an American correspondent, Nate Thayer, that some governments in the West are attempting to derail the "peace process" by their reluctance to allow the Khmers Rouges to play their full role in it. There is a grain of truth in what he said.
As James Baker III was delivering his
speech at the Paris Conference, he said casually that his government
had no objection to a trial of those responsible for past horrors
in Cambodia, with whom he was about to sign the Agreements giving
them a legal share of the future power in Cambodia. It was the
first time a high-ranking US official had publicly considered
such an idea.1
Monsieur Dumas escaped this contradiction by laughing. But Mr Baker does not even seem to know how to smile. He wants to have it both ways: to sign an agreement that jacks the Khmers Rouges up into a legitimate position and also to distance himself from them on moral and legal grounds: his right hand ignores what his left hand is doing. If Monsieur Dumas scoffed at the notion of international law binding sovereign states, Mr Baker was more subtle. He implied that, although denying it now, his government could, in the future, give its approval to an application of the law if others, Cambodians for instance, choose to take such action. Seen from Pol Pot's point of view, this could be seen as an obvious duplicity.
In the following weeks, there has been a lot of speculation in the Western press, feeding on comments it extracted from Cambodian leaders, on the circumstances which could lead to a trial for genocide of the Khmers Rouges. But nobody so far has considered taking action and Prince Sihanouk, speaking in the Royal Palace on November 16 aptly said that, before being brought to the dock, Pol Pot must first be found. He suggested that one might ask "the prestigious general Suchinda Kaprayoon, chief of the Royal Thai Army, who told me recently he just had a most agreeable conversation with Pol Pot". In addition, an obviously embarrassed Sihanouk said he would not visit the Tuol Sleng "Genocide Museum".
Everyone knows that for the last dozen years Pol Pot has been quietly sitting in his compound near the Thai town named Trat, enjoying Chinese money, Royal Thai Army protection and inconspicuous support from what could be called the CIA border network. There he is able to direct the Khmers Rouges political and military campaign in Cambodia and hold long seminars to train his local commanders and appraise them of the new line.2
Though he has dropped out of public life on the advice of the Chinese who found that his name was embarrassing in the West, he obviously does not feel at risk. If a move is later undertaken to bring him to court, it will mean the Khmers Rouges' usefulness as a weapon against communist Vietnam has dwindled into insignificance. By then, of course, the moral strength of the case against them will have diminished correspondingly.
These considerations remain valid regardless of which words --with their varying legal implications-- we use to describe the huge human losses which occurred in Cambodia under Communist Party rule, with Pol Pot as the highest authority. I shall discuss the use of the word "genocide" later, but let us first look at the facts.
Ben Kiernan has provided information on those limited surveys, conducted in the years immediately following the DK's demise, which are available to us.3
They were mostly carried out by individuals doing research on the border. No institution attempted to do a global survey only the CIA provided an estimate based on several explicit hypotheses, which raised a number of questions.4
It should be very clear that we do not know the real figures and it is also probable we shall never have them because the "killing fields" were operated with very few written documents. Of those that have been found, many are still inaccessible. Moreover, the killers are still at large in the jungle. The documents lack precise figures about the size of the population when the war started in 1970, when it stopped in 1975, when Pol Pot fled in 1979, and even now. These have not been destroyed: they never existed. Moreover, Khmers are not always registered and change their name at will.
Based on these few surveys and my own interviews, I fully accept an estimate between one and 1.5 million deaths. We must keep in mind that these figures have been constructed by asking individuals to collect the number of family members thought as being dead or missing. Some of the missing persons may of course be alive, somewhere else. The Red Cross tracing system and Khmer newspapers and television still carry requests for information on missing or lost persons, with obviously some results. But the number of people thus accounted for is probably not very high.
On the other hand, Khmers would include in their "family" count a sizeable amount of non-kin people, like sworn friends, adopted children, neighbours, who, for all practical purposes, are family members. But these people would also be claimed by other families as their kin relatives, leading to double counting. I consider that the proportion of double counts is probably high in the early border surveys and would fully account for the three million figure produced by the PRK, if this is based on any serious work, which I doubt.
There were three main causes of violent deaths.
First, was the killing of identified Lon Nol regime personnel, heavy at the beginning, following the 17 April 1975 collapse. There was obviously a central decision to eliminate these people, as an extension of the death promised to the seven "supertraitors" who led the ousted regime. Possibly between 100,000 and 200,000, including relatives, were executed under this blanket order, which was, though, not applied everywhere in the same way. The thinking was probably to eliminate all those who had been invested with some form of power in the old society and could then be a germ for growing again a power hostile to the revolution.
Then there were the intra-Party purges. The need for the Party Centre to establish itself as the sole source of authority led to the destruction of individuals, group or zonal commands, including their relatives, former subordinates and associated non-Party people who were deemed by the Pol Pot group as having either intellectual origins or political affiliations that were not 100 per cent inspired by the Centre. They called it the "purification" of the Party, and each new wave of purges increased the "level of purity". Several tens of thousands of people were thus disposed of, a lot of them after "confessing" imaginary treasons. The figure may be as high as 200,000 people if we include the destruction of non-Party civilians in the Eastern zone in 1978.
Finally there were assertive killings. Local cadres, mostly uneducated peasants, or half-educated teachers, had risen to power because they had been good petty military leaders in the war. They compensated for their lack of legitimacy, their incompetence and their lack of grasp of social mechanisms in an extremely authoritarian way, even to the extent of killing anyone not showing the mask of passive acceptance. It is impossible to estimate the number of those killings --which did not derive from central orders but from the psychological requirements of youngsters in need of asserting an undue authority, but, by any count, it was massive.
Attention should be paid to this phenomenon
as its dynamic is still active in today's society, and even more
threatening with the planned demobilization of 70 per cent of
the troops. The weakness, or the outright lack of institutional
links among individuals may lead someone in authority, facing
any form of challenge, to resort to immediate and violent retaliation.
This is probably a result of the traditional basic education,
handed down from the ancient times when a majority of the people
were slaves of the rulers, which insists that authority should
never, and cannot be, challenged for any reason whatsoever.5
One way or another, these three categories of mass killings had the same purpose: to establish an entirely new type of power, based on an entirely new type of people, drawn from social layers from which no one had ever dreamed of climbing to the top. It was, in a nutshell, a revolution, although it was produced by not much more than the power of the gun. We know of violent political changes which are not revolutions and of revolutions which are not bloody. I shall leave that to philosophers, but it could be useful to remember that the old regime, until 1970, treated its opponents in a very rough way which included the use of systematic violence, claimed as a legitimate response to opponents of bad faith. Sihanouk's regime pushed the future revolutionaries into the forested wilderness whence they emerged in 1975 to gather power like a ripe fruit.
This may lead us to a more thorough examination of the problems.
What were the social, political and economic pre-conditions for genocide in Cambodia?
The most obvious answer is the war, which produced a political vacuum in Phnom Penh in 1975. In the wake of the 17 March 1970, coup, the war apparently started as a continuation of the American war against the Vietnamese communists. But it immediately cracked wide open Khmer society with, very broadly speaking, on the one hand the urban bourgeoisie thirsty for dollars and Western consumption goods and, on the other hand, the more traditionalist peasantry, almost untouched by the modern economy. The Republican regime quickly dissipated any hope of reform and immediately lost the war. Then the war went on as a massive destruction of the countryside by air power. The most important political change to come was the provision inserted by the US into the Paris Agreements in 1973 which obliged the VC/NVA to evacuate Cambodia in a naive attempt to revive the Lon Nol regime. As a result, the Vietnamese handed over the administration of the countryside to Pol Pot who started immediately to eliminate, one by one, his allies in the "Front" and the "impure" elements, namely all those who had not been directly forged by him, inside the Communist Party. Under the heaviest bombings ever launched so far on a country, radicalization was accelerated and in some areas an authoritarian policy was implemented which was to become standard after April 1975. Without the war which, in a bitter paradox, the Americans needed to prepare their orderly withdrawal from Vietnam, Pol Pot's tiny Communist Party would certainly have met the same fate as its equivalents in Malaysia, Thailand and Burma --a marginal insurrection partly fed by China, doomed to slow extinction.
The conditions of this war permitted the progressive elimination of all moderates or less-than extremists, with the exception of the person of Sihanouk, carefully kept as a symbol in Peking. A small secretive clique arose, entirely devoid of experience in organizing economics or man_uvring social forces. Their narrow nationalism led them to believe that Cambodia was now able alone to solve problems which were still unresolved elsewhere. If things failed, if the Cambodian revolution quickly turned into a bloody mess, it was mainly for intellectual and cultural reasons. These "thinkers" never suspected the complexity and the contradictory nature of social evolution. They did not master the meaning of the ideas they were using and, unable to convince, they either hid their views or resorted to terror and passive acceptance.6
Stalin, at least, was a realist. Pol Pot, a much watered-down imitation of a faded Chinese copy of Uncle Joe, was and still is an unimaginative idealist, a forest monk, lost in dreams. The tragedy came when an imported war gave him hosts of uneducated wild youngsters toting guns to translate the dreams into a deadly reality. As this war drags into its twenty-second year, the man is still there, still preaching the same bad news.
What were the aims and methods of the Khmers Rouges movement?
The aim was to establish, for the first time since the almost mythological period of Angkor, an independent state, without any foreign interference or influence (the Chinese role went unaknowledged), more or less autarchic. Destroying the towns, the bourgeois class and even religion (also seen as foreign) was deemed to be necessary to rediscover the "Original Khmer", which happens to be the name Pol Pot used in his first known article, written in Paris in 1952.7
These ideas of a pre-Hindu, pre-urban, pre-State "original" Khmer society, ideally organized in a kind of basic village democracy, later adulterated by every successive forms of state power establishing oppressive authority on the basis of doctrinal ideas borrowed from outside (India, China, Europe), were elabourated by a brilliant young Khmer intellectual, Keng Vannsak, probably the most influential figure in the Khmer intelligentsia in the middle of this century. Although not a Marxist himself, he blended a Marxist view of history with a Rousseauist concept of a primitive form of democracy based on a "contract", adapted to the tentative reconstruction of Khmer history by French orientalist historians. Although by no means supported by hard facts, this interpretation had the advantage of putting the blame for all evils on the kingship and of channelling energies to fight the puppet king and the French colonial authorities who were using him in such a blatant way.
This struck at the very heart of a controversy which raged among colonial historians at the beginning of this century concerning the nature of these Southeast Asian societies which during the last 2,000 years had developed statecraft along the lines of successive Indian patterns, sometimes called "Hindu-ized kingdoms". George C_dès, who coined this expression, wrote: "The Cambodian is a hinduized Phnong",8 referring to the Khmer word for the "savages" living a tribal life in the mountains, out of the royal realm, and speaking dialects different from but related to the Khmer lowland language. Military expeditions sometimes brought back phnongs as slaves who then became Khmer through integration into a state and a culture imported from India. This is the process alluded to by C_dès in a sentence which raised the question of the real depth of this acculturation and of what was left of the non-Indian origins in the true culture of Cambodia.
In Paris, Saloth Sar (the future Pol Pot) and Keng Vannsak became close friends and though Vannsak did not join the French CP, they worked together, agitating against Sihanouk and his rotten alliance with the French. That was student politics, in those times, but when he came back to Phnom Penh and chose to fight within the ranks of the Democrat Party, trying to renovate its leadership and radicalize its opposition to Sihanouk, who was tied by his subservience to the colonial masters, Vannsak enlisted the help of Pol Pot, by then a full-time member of the communist Phnom Penh leadership, to reorganize the party and prepare for the elections. Sihanouk, using the most undemocratic means, forced an electoral rout on both the Democrat Party and the Pracheachon (the legal arm of the communists) and Pol Pot, promoted as Secretary General after the killing of the previous one, Tou Samouth, by the secret police, decided to go into hiding in the forest. When he left Phnom Penh in 1963, the man who took him on the ship upstream to Krauchmar, where he was to exfiltrate from public life, was none other than Keng Vannsak.
After some time passed in Base 100, a Viet Cong logistical area in the northestern province of Rattanakiri, Pol Pot moved to live among the phnongs, (the "savages"), away from the Vietnamese. There he discovered the tribal life of these "original" Khmers and learned to hold these people in deep appreciation, later giving them as examples of "purity", meaning they had not been spoiled by royalty, Buddhism, money or any other foreign imported ideas and instruments of domination. He used them as bodygards and encouraged cadres to marry tribal women. He transferred the "primitive democracy" that Vannsak had put in a time framework (the "origin") into a space category by which purity on the periphery would come to encircle the soiled heartland of the country and, in a Maoist graphical way, conquer it. This highly debatable view of the Khmer past 9 thus left a recognizable imprint on Pol Pot's mind and limited historical knowledge this Utopian vision of a "democratic village state", buried in the past, led to the curious unorthodox appellation of the new State: literally, "Kampuchea Democracy", more usually translated as "Democratic Kampuchea" (DK).
As for the methods used to achieve this desperate nationalistic vision of a country returning to its obfuscated roots, they were classical Asian communist ones, learned from the Vietnamese and Chinese professional organizers, but learned as Cambodians do learn, by rote, more accustomed to reproducing the form than to catching the spirit. These methods included the passive indoctrination of the youth (considered as naturally "pure") with a crypto-Buddhist morality emphasizing modesty and obedience, and the use of terror instead of political persuasion, a sophisticated technique to which Cambodians, unlike other Asian communists, rarely resorted.
Terror spread gradually, giving birth to specialized organs which, as they did in other communist revolutions, outgrew their objectives and set about to destroy the very cradle from which they grew. If we compare the short Pol Pot era with the beginnings of communist state power in Soviet Union, Mongolia, China, Albania, Yugoslavia, to take examples of indigenous movements taking over, and even Korea, the Cambodian case is comparable in the scope of destruction brought about by the requirements of establishing a completely new social order. The difference lies in the direct American involvement in the chaos conducive to this great destruction and the presence of television crews at the border in the heat of events. Also, the sudden fall deprived Pol Pot of the time to "normalize". There were indications that he was moving in that direction. Who remembers clearly the early purges led by Choibalsan or Kim Il Sung or Enver Hodja?
What were the results? Who were the victims? How many were they?
I have already addressed these questions in part. However, I should add, concerning the case of the minority Chams, that I believe there is no evidence at all for a persecution based on "race" or ethnicity but that they were victims of an attempt to eradicate religion, as a matter of general policy, exemplified by the razing of the Catholic cathedral in Phnom Penh, undertaken early after the victory, and the general suppression of Buddhism. Chams were (and still are) the core and the majority of the Muslim community in Cambodia. If there was more resistance among the Muslims, and then more repression, it is because Islam as a cement was stronger than other religious beliefs. Anyway, the use of words like "national minorities", introduced into the political language of Cambodia by the Vietnamese, after the Soviet and Chinese models, is entirely misleading and do not describe at all the traditional status of small religious or linguistic groups in the country. This complicated issue would require lengthy treatment which I shall not pursue here. But, generally speaking, people were persecuted under DK because of what they believed, or were supposed by security organs to believe, and because of family links with those suspected of harbouring wrong beliefs or thoughts detrimental to the State. Killings based on racist hatred involved only the small number of Vietnamese residents left after the May 1975 evacuation and the wanton murdering of Vietnamese farmers in the raids across the border in 19778. The practice of systematically killing Vietnamese civilians is still the policy of the Khmers Rouges. Chinese and Sino-Khmers were not killed as such but as traders and capitalists, in the greatest need of "reformation", mostly by hard labour. From the point of view of the Genocide Convention, destroying an ethnic group or destroying a religious group is the same crime. But looking for a "racist" motive in the persecution of the Chams seems to stem from an unconscious desire to equate the Chams with the Jews and Pol Pot with Hitler (the same operation as with the Kurds in the case of Saddam Hussein), which might be good propaganda but is poor history.
Besides the killings motivated by politics, the big majority of those who perished during the DK era died of hunger, deprivation and diseases related to malnourishment and exhaustion. The greatest part of the human losses must be ascribed to the economic policy of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The whole population sent back to the rice fields was organized into large units called co-operatives, although they were nothing more than State farms with slave manpower. The Centre decreed quotas of rice to be delivered to the State and, emulating the Chinese communes, set quite unrealistic quotas for a country with one of the lowest levels of rice productivity in the world. Very soon, although varying according to local conditions,10 the co-operatives could not deliver the requested quantities other than by taking them from the food reserves set aside for the workers. The co-operative leaders understood that failure to meet the quotas was tantamount to treason, a crime they would pay for with their lives. Although they obviously also used food to discriminate between friends and foes, thus leaving most of the burden due to the lack of food on the shoulders of the former urban population, they could not dispute the targets imposed on them from above. In fact many of them were later killed when the southwest cadres, more trusted by the Centre, came and took over, after information about the disastrous situation had started to filter up and reach Pol Pot's offices. The bad news was ascribed to treason anyway and purges were launched on a wide scale. But in general the southwest cadres, under Ta Mok, were even more ruthless than their predecessors because they had very good reasons to see that the failure to meet these unrevised quotas was an urgent matter of life and death. Everyone had to suffer to ensure the survival of the tormentors. But if the leadership had not been so unrealistic, the system could have worked without starving the workers, as some improvements in productivity were introduced in some places, at least for a while.
What were the effects on the survivors? On neighboring countries?
Survivors, in early 1979, were left with a totally disrupted social and economic life. Families were scattered and eveyone was scavenging for food. It was worse than any war because the tragedy affected everyone everywhere in the country. The word "rebuilding" never had such a full meaning. Whereas people slowly started to settle down and reunite with whoever of the family had survived, a considerable part of the surviving élite decided Cambodia was to be written off, that it was not worth rebuilding it under the Vietnamese saviours, and then made the individual choice of rushing to the border to reach the "dreamland" of abundance, a third country in the West. Coming from people who professed a nationalist fervour before the catastrophe, and after it in the safety of exile, this exodus shows how conventional and superficial the attachment to the idea of nation had been in the educated élite. They abandoned the sinking ship at a time when their lives were no longer threatened, and their flight heavily handicapped the redevelopment of the country for at least one or two generations. The flight of the trained teachers or their refusal to go back to the schools, in particular, has produced the nightmarish situation of education we can see in today's Cambodia.
The psychological effects of these years of terror and suffering are certainly very deep but have not been studied at all. The resumption of medical services was entirely in the field of physical health and, up to this day, there is no psychological therapy available other than the rather efficient one provided by the traditional healers, the kru khmaer. Some limited clinical observations suggest that damage has been widespread, particularly for women, and that a great many people still suffer from their traumatic experiences. This field is still wide open for analysis and action.
Another set of consequences has been a kind of political freeze due to the Vietnamese military and political presence for ten years. The threat of a return of the Khmers Rouges cooled the people into a passive acceptance of a regime they had much to object to, although it was quite efficient in the use of the small resources it could muster. Even the Paris Agreements provided a system ensuring the military factions --ghosts coming down from the past-- a political role that Cambodians would probably not choose if they had a chance to freely express their will.11
Among the consequences, we should include the systematic elimination of critical minds. Cambodian culture certainly emphasizes submission, but if most people keep their inner thoughts to themselves, a small number of people develop highly organized critical views and provide the only channel by which the power learns anything about public opinion. The absence of most of these people in Cambodia after the DK period made very difficult the correction of the political course set by the new regime. Moreover, many survivors hide the shame of having been silent slaves. Very often, they had not been able to maintain moral standards and this, in itself, may be the cause of recurrent depression.
For neighbouring countries, the effect of the rise and demise of the DK was to attract them into a new cycle of conflicts. Thailand, after swallowing some bloody Khmers Rouges incursions in border villages, quickly reached an agreement with the new masters in Phnom Penh through which a small barter border trade was resumed and rather friendly relations were obtained. The Thai military, closing their eyes to Pol Pot's dealings with the Thai communists, saw the new regime as escaping Hanoi influence and thereby reopening this buffer area for later Thai potential influence. This was a calculated strategic advance after the disastrous end of the Vietnam war. This paved the way for the January 1979 decision to accept the Chinese proposal of a tripartite alliance between the Thai military, the battered Khmers Rouges and Chinese logistics to provide Pol Pot with military equipment and money, under the cloak of a silent US approval. The Khmers Rouges were to act as a battering ram in the ongoing Western war with Vietnam, in the best interests of a China bent on pressuring the Vietnamese into "normal" tributary submission.
The only country deeply affected was Vietnam. The communists had withdrawn their forces from Cambodia in early 1973, leaving behind only storage facilities in the remote northeast border area. But within days of the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmers Rouges attacked the large island of Phu Quoc and several incidents occurred at sea. Then, in the process of the evacuation of towns, all remaining ethnic Vietnamese, many of them born in Cambodia, were expelled. Uneasy peaceful relations were restored and lasted until about the end of 1976. The death of Mao and the crisis which followed in Peking somehow triggered some waves in Phnom Penh and the beginning of the high-level purges. It was probably at that time that preparations for the first transborder raids were made. The year 1977 saw several dozen incidents typically involving two or three hundred Khmer soldiers attacking a Vietnamese village, slaughtering the peasants, including women and children, looting the cattle and burning down the place entirely. Local militias could not stop these well-armed infiltrations. Provincial authorities evacuated between one and two million persons from the border. Hanoi kept the losses secret while still hoping for a diplomatic solution to this undeclared border war. This proved later to be a costly mistake because it prevented Hanoi from showing that it was reacting in defence when its armies struck at the centre of Pol Pot's battle order.
The motivations of Pol Pot's policy of attacking Vietnam are not, to this day, very clear. We may rule out local initiatives and must ascribe this decision to the Party Centre which later claimed it had determined much earlier, in secrecy, that the Vietnamese were the "acute enemy". Although this policy of aggression may seem to us silly and self-defeating, we must remember that most certainly the Party Centre thought the Vietnamese were weak, even cowards, as shown by the fact that they had agreed to negotiate and sign the 1973 Paris Agreements. Most probably Pol Pot believed he had single handedly defeated US imperialism the proof of it was that the fall of Saigon occurred after the fall of Phnom Penh.
Although the DK never officially claimed such a policy, there are indications that local commanders told their troops that they were going to reconquer Kampuchea Krom, the lost provinces absorbed by Vietnam two centuries ago. Successive royal Khmer governments, including Sihanouk's, always maintained that, even though they did not request an alteration of the maps, they had never fully recognized the successive transfers of sovereignty accomplished by the Annamese emperors or the French colonial government. In a rather atypical way, Ieng Sary's foreign ministry gave a slightly privileged status to Cambodia's only legal expert on the border question, Sarin Chhak who, though not a communist, was left quietly working on historical documents and providing the CP leadership with information, notes and explanations on these complicated issues.12
Though Sarin Chhak disappeared at the hands of the Vietnamese troops on 7 January 1979, his papers have survived and are now in private hands in Phnom Penh, a testimony to the deep attention Pol Pot paid to the question of the lost provinces and the claims the Cambodian State could still eventually lay to them.
The consequences are well known. Hanoi reacted to the threat against its southern provinces by a mixture of diplomatic, political and military moves which have been well described by Nayan Chanda, and my own research fully concurs with his findings.13
Pol Pot paid for his miscalculation with the destruction of his regime. Had he refrained from going over the border, he most probably would still be in power, the killings would have subsided and we would have another North Korea, another "hermit kingdom" of silent slaves, on which our information would be very sketchy, and our indignation slight.
What problems arise in defining "genocide"? Does the Cambodian case fit the requirements of the Genocide Convention?
It is certainly appropriate to sit here, in the Yale Law School, in a Raphael Lemkin Symposium, and now discuss the problem of defining "genocide" because the very word was coined exactly fifty years ago by a New York Polish Jewish publicist called Raphael Lemkin. A zealous Zionist, he warned of the impending destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and drew argument from the persecution --inventing a word to name the killing of a race-- to reassert the necessity to create a Jewish state, to which all the Jews of the world would migrate and thus suppress the existence of any "Jewish question".14
He wanted to impress his readers with the idea that the forcible disappearance of the Jews from the face of the earth would be, among nations, comparable with suppressing a person from among fellow humans. He spent three years lobbying in the newly established United Nations before he succeeded in having his draft Convention voted by the General Assembly in December 1948. Then followed a long fight for ratification. Successive American administrations attempted to get a ratification because they basically saw in it a potential anti-Soviet weapon but they had to face a very determined opposition from the American Bar Association which saw contradictions in the text with US constitutional principles. We must be reminded that up to now, nobody, and certainly not the Nazis, has ever been brought to court to face the charge of genocide, with the ridiculous exception of Ceaucescu in the mock trial before his summary execution.15
Does the fact that this crime has never been tested in court mean that it has never been committed since the time it was registered in international law? Or does it mean it is an unusable category, legally flawed, that prosecutors discard because they would rather rely on more solidly established criminal charges?
Lemkin's neologism lingered for a long time. The notion was a curiosity and was not much picked up. After World War II, the standard word for what happened to the Jews in the Eastern territories was "extermination". Technically, there was no need for a new word. The UN in 1948 was merely diplomatic firing-ground for EastWest ideological fights, with Lemkin himself the expected Cold Warrior. Mass murders, massacres, suppression of aborigines or minorities fill the pages of history books and there is, unfortunately, "nothing new under the sun". George Orwell was writing books to show what consequences were implied by changes in the meaning of words. By the end of the war, the Allied powers had decided to try the Axis leaders in an attempt to use guilt to destroy in advance any attempt of revival of a national spirit, both in Germany and Japan. In order to achieve this, the Allies created a special military court, with special rules, and invented a new category of crime, said to be "crime against humanity". It was to be applied in a retroactive way, which, we should recall, is prohibited by the Declaration of Human Rights. Any lawyer knows that, in normal times if it were submitted to any Appellate Court, the Nuremberg trial would be annulled. But these times were not quite normal. There was of course no legal need for this innovation. The sheer application of German law would have provided straightforward condemnations, but there was the political need of a device to destroy morally an already vanquished nation, to go beyond a mere military defeat. That failed in Japan but succeeded well in Germany, where Christianity provided a ready acceptance of guilt. But nobody picked up the invention of Lemkin and it seems the word, as a legal tool, cannot be found in the 42 volumes of the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal.
Maybe the word, and the idea, have a built-in weakness. The idea was to describe the killing (-cide) of a people. But instead of using the Greek roots for people (demos ) or nation (ethnos ), or more simply the Latin root for people (populus ), Lemkin had used the word for "race", or "group related by blood and kin", which included the notion of shared heredity that appears in the word genetics. As did most people, including scientists, in the first half of this century, Lemkin, educated in Lvov and Heidelberg, thought that mankind was divided into "races". Classifications varied according to authors (Caucasian, Nordic, Black, Mongoloid, Semitic and what not). Many Jewish authors spoke also of a "Jewish race". It was only later, when the advance of biological sciences showed that although individuals may vary genetically, these variations had little significance and there is no such a thing as "race" inside the global human population, that the concept of biological racism began to decay.
The notion of "killing a race" (the original meaning of the word "genocide") might have been embarrassing for the big powers with the dismal record shown in the recent past by the United States and its treatment of the native Amerindians, by the USSR and its deportation of populations collectively accused of "collaboration" with the Germans, by the Allied colonial powers, like France and Great Britain, still using race as a political basis for their supremacy, and so on. To further explain why genocide was never an influential concept, we may refer to a French lawyer, Bernard Jouanneau, who wrote for the Socialist Party the bill that became a law in France, in July 1990, making it a crime to dissent publicly from the verdict of the Nuremberg Trial.16
In a radio programme, he explained that they had wanted to find a way to punish those who deny the Nazis perpetrated the act of genocide against the Jews. But when we tried to define what genocide was, he said in substance, we found out the past was full of events which could be described as such, like the slave trade, wars of destruction, the Spanish conquista of America, and even some ugly episodes of the French Revolution, and that there existed controversies about the nature of these events. Since it looked impossible to rule by law what historians could or could not say about all past events but one, the lawyer turned legislator resorted to the legal enforcement of respect for the Nuremberg verdict, which, however, does not speak of genocide.
So, if jurists, politicians, historians (with the exception of Cold War diplomats) found this notion too vague to handle with any amount of practical usefulness, a reality demonstrated by the fact that in fifty years no one has ever been indicted on this count in a fair trial, how come that it has crept into such general use?
For a long time, the word was used in only one connection, the one for which Lemkin had coined it. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 triggered the slow evolution of Western understanding of World War II: as the real reasons for the war receded into the past, being obscured by a new world order born with the victory, the relative importance of the Nazi persecution of the Jews was given a growing prominence until, a generation later, many people believe that the fate of the Jews lay at the core of the war. It is a little bit as if, in one or two generations from now, writers and historians were to try to have us believe that the whole Pol Pot enterprise was centred on the will to exterminate the Chams. In an Islamic view of things (already more or less prevalent, for instance, in the Malaysian perception of Pol Pot), this could be perfectly understandable, and supported by a careful selection of the facts.
From the 1960s onward, Israel's growing needs for Western support, money, weapons and general protection shifted the moral grounds of its requests more and more on to what the Nazis had done. No more massive Jewish immigration was anticipated and the enormous military requirements, which at one point pushed the Israeli share of US world-wide aid to almost half, led to a considerable effort in propaganda to spread the Israeli point of view across Western public opinion. The vocabulary itself testifies to the spread of the word "genocide", the explosion of the word "holocaust" (with a completely distorted meaning), the appearance of the word "shoah" and the near disappearance of words like "destruction", "extermination", etc. An analysis of book titles together with their date of first printing would reveal a lot about our changing ideological view of things past and present.
If, for a long time, the notion of genocide was restricted to one event, which happened once in history to one people, the political benefit it provided to the State of Israel could only attract attention and lead to emulation. The next to adopt it as a political instrument were the Armenian nationalists. The Israeli exemple of the "rebirth" of a State which had disappeared since the ancient times could not but appeal to radical Armenian nationalists who were eager, not only to revive a state --they had one under communist rule in the Soviet Union-- but to claim its former political space, now the northeastern corner of Turkey, where "historical Armenia" was once to be found, and from where all Armenians had been forcibly expelled in 1915. By all sorts of means, including terror, Armenian nationalists tried to obtain from Western governments an official pronouncement that what had been known all along as the 1915 "Armenian massacres" and deportation had really been "genocide", possibly the first in our time. Only this word, internationally recognized, would pave the way for a process of dismantling Turkish territory. It was precisely for that reason that Western governments, put under pressure, nevertheless refused to include it in official statements, not out of lack of sympathy for the Armenian cause, but for fear of creating an unmanageable conflict with a valuable ally.17
A wise decision when one sees the war that has been going on for the past two or three years between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan for the control of Upper Karabagh, a small district inhabited mostly by Armenians.
The most violent Armenian militants, requesting recognition of "genocide", belonged to the ASALA movement, born in Beirut among youngsters who had been under strong Palestinian influence. Those Palestinians were under the spell of the Israeli success in attracting international support and were prone to imitate Israeli moves, including the use of the notion of genocide (victims of which would be the Palestinian people).
Recently, Serbia justified its attacks on Croatia by calling the mass murders which occured in the region during the last world war genocide. Every mass killing is becoming an act of genocide when its memory is being used as grounds for national expansion, war against neighbours, or any form of violence which is difficult to legitimize. The usual inflation of political vocabulary led also to a growing misappropriation of the word. We currently hear that the road accidents of the weekend are causing a genocide, that a mad killer shot eleven people in an act of genocide, that AIDS is a potential genocide, and so on. Examples may be culled from any media.
The concept of "ethnocide", launched in 1968 to describe the cultural destruction of native tribes, in places like Brazil or Guatemala, never really took off and, instead, "cultural genocide" (implying the death of a culture, and not the physical destruction of the people) has been widely used to describe, for instance, the near total annihilation of cultural places and goods in Tibet by the Chinese so-called Cultural Revolution.18
Does the Cambodian case fit the requirements of the Genocide Convention?
If we understand genocide, as most people do, as the killing of people purely on ethnic grounds, or the attempt to do so, then Cambodia does not fit in. Even cases of indiscriminate killings based on purely ethnic, or tribal discrimination, as we have seen taking place, for instance, in Burundi, or elsewhere in Africa, Sabra and Chatila, the Sumgait pogrom against Armenians, the killings of Tibetans in Eastern Tibet, the destruction of a third of the population of East Timor by the Indonesian army, the destruction of Brazilian or other Amerindian tribes, and many other similar massacres which have taken place since the Genocide Convention has been "active" (1951), show that the international community cannot handle this notion because too many of its members are or have been guilty of barbaric acts of this kind. Big powers not only close their eyes when it is committed by one of their allies but they usually help them to commit and cover up the crime.19
The press and the judicial powers are usually accomplices, either by silently approving or by directing selective blame on the enemy's misdeeds.
Amid growing speculation in the West on these questions concerning Cambodia, few writers address the Cambodian reaction. The concept of genocide is of course a complete novelty in this country. But in general Khmer ideas about law may look rather confused. It would take a long time to try to show that two entirely diffrent schools of thought --the first one inherited from Theravada Buddhism mixed with traditional wisdom, the second one painstakingly brought into the country by the colonial administration-- lived side by side without really blending together. The Cambodian Codes were mostly a matter of oral tradition and justice was administered by political authorities on the basis of wise judgement rather than on any fixed set of abstract principles, even if some crimes had established penalties.20
Colonial administration needed a body of logically related notions as a framework into which its power and activities, entirely new in the country, could be regulated. The Cambodians could not care less and the new legal system remained largely restricted to the French sphere of action. For instance, there were repeated attempts, from the start, to involve the Cambodians in establishing a land ownership system --which they found entirely alien.21
Later, notions of Roman law were incorporated in state laws. There were written laws, voted by an elected Assembly, a system of courts and even a Faculty of Law. But this alien system affected the population only slightly and never put down intellectual roots in it. The arbitrary decisions of a mostly corrupt administration, the violence of the state power and the unlimited greed of the commercial class anyway made a mockery of any pretence of a rule of law.
In this Ancien régime mentality, there is no justice to be expected from a system entirely devoted to the interests of the mighty and the wealthy. This does not mean Cambodia is a lawless society. On the contrary. A complicated set of implicit moral rules regulates everyday life and very clear standards of good conduct are taught to the young. If circumstances of war, famine and political crises allow massive ruptures and if the necessities of survival throw individuals beyond the normal rules, they reappear afterwards. But they are not, in themselves, strong enough to impose order on what we could be tempted to call the "natural anarchy" of the Khmers. So far, only some form of terror has succeeded in doing this because the law is not deeply rooted in the peoples' consciences.
The concept of a particularly defined concept of "genocide" and of the trial of a political chief would seem rather ludicrous to most Cambodians. Revenge is understandable but retribution belongs to future lives. Trust in an independent judiciary just does not exist, and for good reason. A trial held by foreigners would be just one more foreigners' business. With the exception of a tiny number of intellectuals and politicians acquainted with Western mores, everyone would see in the complicated procedures of a court the useless prelude to a retaliatory killing. And, anyway, such a trial has taken place already. In the summer of 1979, an international tribunal was convened in Phnom Penh to try Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia. Documents, testimonies, witnesses were produced. I believe that around 1,000 pages of documentation were presented. A summary was later published.22
As it was obviously organized by the Vietnamese, the Western press ignored it. Ten years passed before this same press started toying with the idea of a genocide trial, while Cambodia had all along been submitted to an economic embargo the criminal of which nature could also be tested in court. May I submit this idea to our interested lawyers?
Pol Pot is no longer a real person in Cambodia. It has become a common word: "Twelve pol pot entered village so and so." It certainly focuses feelings of hatred and resentment. (The word Pol Pot is never used in Khmer Rouge usage, where the man is usually referred to as "number 87".) Any form of violence would seem legitimate. When a crowd surrounded the house of Khieu Samphân in Phnom Penh in November 1991, the rumour was that "Pol Pot" was there. And even more than blood, what the people wanted to see was the face of the man, a face they have never seen, a face they probably thought of as inhuman. The man never really exposed himself and his name is nothing but a symbol.
We must start from the fact that Cambodians
were never in a position to know the reasons for this bloody mess.
In these ill-clad wild boys, they could only recognize the naked
figure of power, doing what power has always done in this country:
humiliate or eliminate. (This goes a long way towards explaining
what some would describe as suicidal tendencies, in individuals
as well as in society.) Renouncement is the only narrow escape
from the alternative but this time even monks and hermits were
trapped. Would then a trial be a great educational move, providing
at last an opportunity for the new generation to reconcile remembrance
and understanding? It probably could. Although historians usually
pass severe judgement on this kind of great political trial, these
staged dramas may have a cathartic effet, reorder collective thought
and provide new bridges for the legitimization of emerging powers.
But we should remain lucid: the law is built with concepts and
politics with symbols. A political trial is a hybrid exercise
where lawyers do their intellectual trick while the audience at
large watches a symbolic play.23
Today, Cambodians both remember and forget. The pains they suffered, as individuals, as members of crushed families, are deeply ingrained and the wounds will probably never heal. But the catastrophe seems to remain cicumscribed in personal history. Paradoxically, this period of totally collective life developed into an individualistic struggle for life, aimed at surviving and, later, at re-establishing some normalcy. The global dimension was just an added burden and, for many, the sense of a collective drama seems to be waning.
In the West, the paradigm of genocide is still very much centred on Auschwitz. So true is this that, in an effort to attract part of the sinister charisma of Auschwitz, the masters of the new Cambodian regime, in early 1979, commissioned some Vietnamese experts, trained in Poland, to refurbish the interrogation centre called Tuol Sleng.24
Very few people saw it in its original state. But this paradigm plays also in another field, called in a vague manner: memory. As opposed to "history" (reconstruction of the past based on documents and material evidence), "memory" would be a tale of the past based on personal remembrance, subjective feelings, nostalgic attachment to "roots". Some even think that "memory" has more truth in it than the cold reasoning of "history". Genocide and the "memory" of it (basically, a reconstruction made by the descendants of the survivors) are linked with a refusal to mourn (and an acceptance of the passing away) of those who died an unnatural death. Psychoanalysis has a lot to say about this.25
Jews and Khmers do not mourn and bury the dead in the same way and there is the risk that our Western concept of "memory" could be entirely irrelevant to the Khmers who obviously have their own. I wish we may not succumb to the temptation to force our views on them, as we already do in so many other fields.
When we compare the Cambodian experience with the legacy of fascism --and we have no doubt as to the legitimacy of this comparison-- we should note that, in the case of Europe, there was a struggle against it. Later, people could identify with that struggle, whatever had been the reality of their own commitment, and build a memory, somewhat selective, around these notions of refusal, the struggle of Good against Evil, and victory. But in Cambodia, there was no such struggle. The level of terror was too high. There was not even a victory since Mr Pol Pot is still alive and kicking. Foreigners did the struggle and, with them, a handful of Khmers who were later largely rewarded by the gift of exclusive state power. So, Cambodians have nothing positive to rely on, except an association with a foreign power that most of them would not want. If there is a political memory, it is a rather shameful one of abject submission, fear, passivity, inability to protect one's own family, of helpless dying children, of stealing bits of despicable food. It is difficult to build even hatred on these bases. And when the government, in the 1980s, organized a yearly Day of Hatred, which would have delighted Orwell's sarcastic mind, people performed it casually.
When the crowd rioted in the front of Khieu Samphân's house, an old lady came with her kitchen knife in order to chop the guy into pieces.26
The striking fact was she was alone of her kind. When the people saw the event on television and watched this white-haired man with blood dripping down his face, there was a general feeling of disapproval, a fear, stronger than anger, that bringing back this memory would endanger the present. There is a will to forget. The idea that the Khmers Rouges have changed, which they try so hard to disseminate, could come as an anxiety-killer pill for many people.
Because the government established by the Vietnamese made large use of a rather simplified view of the recent past to justify its policies and its temporary dependence on foreign troops, it was perceived as government propaganda and, as such, it obliterated the survivors' ability to build up their own retrospective understanding. On the Coalition side, it was worse. The victims were coerced into working closely with their killers. Echoing Father Ponchaud, they had to fabricate the myth that the Vietnamese were even more "genocidal" than the DK. Even now Pol Pot refers constantly to the "genocidal and aggressive yuon enemy". And Sihanouk went to great lengths, on American television, to explain that the Khmers Rouges were "no more criminals".
If we understand genocide in a broad sense as meaning unjustified mass murder, then Cambodia, as well as many other states, is a case, and its leaders may be brought to an international court --which, by the way, does not currently exist. If, on the other hand, we consider the notion has a very specific meaning, then we have to expand its significance considerably in order to include Cambodia. This is what I tried to convey, many years ago, when I wrote that "if words have a meaning, there was certainly no genocide in Cambodia".27
I understand that some Cambodians took exception to this sentence, but then is not their use of the word a kind of substitute for a victory over Pol Pot they could not win in the battlefield, and even less by being his political ally?
If we could catch Pol Pot and give him a fair trial, he would certainly claim he was not the worst killer in Cambodia28: he would point out that many victims of starvation suffered the consequences of the aerial destructions of the Cambodian countryside. He would remind us that Messrs Nixon and Kissinger concentrated US air power on his country and destroyed around 600,000 lives in the process. Would they sit in the same dock? Would they also face the charge of genocide in Cambodia, for having killed Khmer peasants "as such"?
Who fought for months and months to include in the future Peace Agreement on Cambodia a reference to the "genocidal practices of the past", in order to provide a ground for the political elimination of the Pol Pot group, at the risk of jeopardizing the whole diplomatic process? It was the Phnom Penh government, led by people who had been very junior leaders in the Khmers Rouges movement and knew, better than most, its true nature. And what happened? The American government gave its full support to the Chinese scrapping of this infamous label. The final version of the Agreements does not mention genocide at all and this is in order to reincorporate the Khmers Rouges into Cambodian public life, very much against the will of the huge majority of the people here. The hypocrisy of American officials explaining that they did everything possible to prevent the return of Pol Pot to Phnom Penh is revolting, particularly when one remembers that at the UN Geneva Conference, in 1981, they voted down the ASEAN proposal to look for a political solution based on a disarmament of the Khmers Rouges.
In fact, there are two entirely different concepts of genocide: the one we all know and use on occasions, as a kind of historical category, and the one used by the lawyers, based on the widely unread UN Convention, which could make the murder of two people fall technically into the "genocide" category, according to the motive for this crime. The discrepancy between the two is so wide that confusion is unavoidable.
The reality is that genocide, massacres, wiping out entire peoples or cultures, and other inhuman atrocities, torture, massive corruption, and so on, are part and parcel of government policies, most usually applied to foreign countries. There is no other law than the law of the jungle. If we want to change this situation, we must reform our own laws first, strip the authorities of their political immunity, abolish the "Reason of State" and the system of official secrecy which covers up all these crimes. If we could reach a stage in which any official would be tried according to the same rules that apply to you and me, to any other ordinary human being, we would not need all these extraordinary concepts because common law is quite enough.
Just after the Algerian war, the French government passed a law of amnesty: the thousands of crimes committed by the troops in this sevenyear long conflict were abolished. They reputedly never existed. Nobody was punished and nobody may publicly be named in connection with those crimes. As for the USA, checking the name of the My Lai village in a Viet Cong list of villages wiped out by the US ground forces, I found out it was one among several hundreds, recorded long before My Lai became a public affair. Was there any enquiry into the destruction of those villages? Were even those responsible for the slaughter in My Lai really punished? Who are we to give moral lessons to others?
I of course fully agree that Pol Pot should be prevented by any means from returning to power. I find it a bit paradoxical that so much blame was poured on the Vietnamese, who did just that, prevent Pol Pot from coming back, by people who did so much to promote the same Pol Pot and insisted he kept his seat in the United Nations. I am also fully in favour of a trial of Pol Pot and of his accomplices and his foreign associates, including American, Thai and Chinese officials who conspired to support him when he was in power and after his fall. I suggest the application of the ordinary Cambodian law for events which took place in Cambodia.
Genocide is nothing else but a political label aiming at the exclusion of a political leader or party beyond the bonds of humanity. It leads us to believe we are good, that we have nothing to do with these monsters. This is entirely misleading. Pol Pot has been produced by our political world, is part of it, is using it and is getting strong from it. Before saying he is dirty --which is what he is without a doubt-- we should clean our own house first29
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Nous nous plaçons sous
la protection de l'article 19 de la Déclaration des Droits
de l'homme, qui stipule:
ARTICLE 19
<Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion
et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être
inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher,
de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de
frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque
moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme,
adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de
l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.