Final say on Cambodian genocide

By Gwynne Dyer

To say that millions died is too much.

-- Pol Pot, 1997

Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?

-- Henry Kissinger, after Pol Pot's death

LONDON (JP): Pol Pot's own Khmer Rouge burned his corpse on April 18 as though it was so much rubbish, which is only fitting. But it hardly seems sufficient punishment for a mass murderer -- and what is truly shameful is that none of his colleagues who did the actual killing are likely to be punished either.

There is no evidence that Pol Pot ever personally killed anybody, even though between a quarter and a third of Cambodia's population (up to 2 million people) were murdered in his four years in power. But then, Hitler never killed anybody in person either. Bush-league tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin do some of their killing in person, but the big-league killers with a program have a more managerial style.

There's no point in seeking profound moral explanations for genocide. Hannah Arendt's famous phrase 'the banality of evil' is half the answer. (She coined it after the trial in Israel of chief Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann, who showed no moral understanding whatever of what he had done, focussing exclusively on his bureaucratic functions). And the other half is just -- us.

We are who we are: higher primates living in groups that are evolutionarily programmed to loathe their neighbors. Among pre- civilized human groups, whether New Guinea Highlanders, Yanomamos in the Amazon, or pre-contact New Zealand Maoris, the chief cause of death among adult males is violence: either murder or war.

Over thousands of years the mass civilizations have slowly constructed moral and legal codes that curbed the violence, at first within a given society and latterly even between societies. But these basic rules about the sanctity of human life are still a fragile construct, and if you put a society under enough pressure they can break down -- which brings us to Henry Kissinger's role in Cambodia.

Cambodia had its own obsessions even before Kissinger's 'realpolitik' dragged it into America's Indochina war. Cambodian nationalism was a wounded animal, resentful of the loss of half the national territory to Thai and Vietnamese neighbors in the centuries before the French colonialists arrived. That created the potential for an explosion.

Pol Pot, born in a village in Kompong Thom province but educated in the royal palace and in post-war Paris, was a potential trigger for that explosion. He combined Maoist methods with a racist xenophobia that ultimately led him to kill any Cambodian who had even had contact with foreigners (except for his own Paris-educated group). But not all triggers are pulled.

Without the U.S. intervention in Cambodia, Pol Pot would probably have ended his days as a privileged, tolerated loony on the fringes of polite Cambodian society (and a couple of million murdered people would still be alive). That is not to say that Henry Kissinger killed them, for he didn't (and neither, personally, did Pol Pot), but questions of responsibility do arise.

"If this doesn't work, it'll be your ass, Henry," President Nixon told Kissinger, his Secretary of State, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The secret bombing campaign against Cambodia was already almost a year old then, and it continued to devastate the rural areas even after Washington's own man, Gen. Lon Nol, was installed in power in Phnom Penh.

In one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Cambodia than the total dropped on Japan in World War II. That was what shattered Cambodian society to the point that a genocidal monomaniac like Pol Pot could come to power in 1975, and spend the next four years 'purifying' Cambodia of all foreign influences.

When Vietnamese troops drove Pol Pot from power in 1979, Washington came to the Khmer Rouge's aid in a vindictive attempt to win "the last battle of the Vietnam war," as an American official put it. American (and Chinese) support for Pol Pot kept Cambodia at war and cut off from foreign aid for another dozen years.

But it never was Henry's ass. It still isn't today, as he cruises from one fat consultancy to another, dismissing the "so- called bombing of Cambodia" as an irrelevant detail of a forgotten history. It was Pol Pot who ordained the exterminations, and other men and women who carried them out. But the chain of causation does not stop there, even if the number of Cambodian peasants directly killed by American bombs was only one or two hundred thousand.

Nobody will ever bring Kissinger to court over this; he will die old and rich in bed. Pol Pot was never brought to court either (to the great relief of many others who feared his testimony). Lesser killers like present Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok ('The Butcher') and Ke Pauk (who organized the massacre of Moslem Cambodians) may one day face trial, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Progress is being made in bringing the perpetrators of the other great genocides of recent years, in Bosnia and Rwanda, before international tribunals. It is a painfully slow process, but Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic may be arrested any day now, and the organizers of the Rwandan genocide are hunted men. Why is there no similar process in Cambodia?

There would be no international tribunal on Bosnia if Serbia could veto it, nor on Rwanda if France had the final say. In Cambodia, unfortunately, the main outside powers involved were the United States and China -- and they do have the final say.