LTO Cambodia: books

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Useful Idiots of the Khmer Rouge

By late 1977 the Pol Pot regime had decided to begin seeking broader international support for their 'Democratic Kampuchea.' In November 1977 Burma's Ne Win became the first head of state to visit Phnom Penh since the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975. Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania followed soon after. Beginning in early 1978, small groups of Communist-sympathizing westerners were invited and/or allowed to visit Cambodia, most often arriving on the then weekly flight from Beijing to Phnom Penh. (Pol Pot History of a Nightmare, by Phillip Short, page 381.) In August of that year a leftist Swedish group including the now repentant Gunnar Bergstrom toured the country and even dined with Pol Pot. Bergstrom made news again in 2008 when he returned to Cambodia after 30 years, this time to offer apologies for supporting the regime and ask forgiveness of the survivors. (For more on Bergstrom see Taiwan News and BBC)

In April 1978, months before Bergstrom arrived in Cambodia, a group of four Americans from the American Communist Party M-L visited the country, declaring themselves the "first Americans to visit Cambodia since April 1975." The group included Robert Brown, David Klein and the editor of the communist The Call magazine Daniel Burstein. (Ironically, Burstein is now a New York venture capitalist and writer, at least according to the Communpedia and from what I have been able to infer from some Googling.)

This group of Americans met with Iang Sary and toured the country for eight days* in what was no doubt a carefully orchestrated outing, including Phnom Penh city and Siem Reap, Kampong Thom, Kampong Cham and Takeo provinces. Afterward, they departed with a very favorable impression of Democratic Kampuchea and the 'accomplishments' of the Khmer Rouge regime. Burstein was so impressed that he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled "On Cambodia: But, Yet," published November 21, 1978 (link,) declaring the stories of Khmer Rouge horrors and genocide that were littering the US press at the time to be slanderous lies. Burstein wrote,

"Everyone knows about the war waged by the United States in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975. But very few people know about or understand the war that it is waging today against that country, which now calls itself Democratic Kampuchea. The was is being fought on many fronts. But it is mainly a propaganda war, a consciously organized, well-financed campaign to spread lies and misinformation about Kampuchea since the victory of its revolution in 1975

I was the first American to visit Kampuchea since April 17, 1975. What I saw has little in common with the stories told by so many journalists and other 'authorities' who have never been there...

The most slanderous of all charges leveled against Kampuchea is that of 'mass genocide,' with figures often cited running into the millions of people. I believe this is a lie, which certain opinion-makers in this country believe can be turned into a 'fact' by repeating it often enough."

Though, in the spirit of a proper apologist he did concede that there may have been "excesses,"

This does not mean there has been no violence or bloodshed since the revolution. The new Government has had to deal with many forces that oppose the revolution -- former Lon Nol officials, as well as organized networks of American, Russian and Vietnamese agents trying to overthrow the Government. Such sabotage has undoubtedly been met with violent suppression. In the course of this, there may even have been some excesses, which no revolution is immune to.

His tour companions were similarly impressed by their experience in Democratic Kampuchea. They produced a 115-page booklet entitled, 'The New Face of Kampuchea: a photo-record of the first American visit to Cambodia since the end of the war,' or 'Kampuchea: A photo-record of the first American visit to Cambodia since April 1975,' written by Klein, with photographs by Robert Brown and published by the now defunct Liberator Press (Chicago) in late 1978. (See The Eyes of the Pineapple for more on Liberator Press.) They arrived at a similar conclusion to Burstein's, i.e. that the Khmer Rouge were liberators, Cambodia was moving in the right direction, the Cambodian people enthusiastic participants in the new order and that the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities were just so much capitalist propaganda.

The very month that this group of Americans were in Phnom Penh, April 1978, the purges of the Eastern Zone and the torture operation at the infamous S-21 prison facility in Phnom Penh (now the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum) were reaching a crescendo. The unfortunates brought to S-21, not far from where the Americans were touring city, were tortured into bizarre and unlikely 'confessions' reflecting the paranoias of Khmer Rouge leadership, sometimes 'admitting' to being counter-revolutionary spies working simultaneously for the Americans, the Russians and the Vietnamese. In his landmark work on the prison, 'Voices from S-21' (page 73,) David Chandler writes, "The Party Center then embarked on a wholesale purge of cadres in the Eastern Zone. In April 1978, so many were brought into S-21 that some of the trucks bearing prisoners had to be turned away...presumably to be taken off to be killed without any interrogation," stocking the killing fields of Choeung Ek just outside of town. In a chillingly deaf echo of this horrible reality, Klein apologetically notes in Kampuchea (page 10) that Khmer Rouge government leaders acknowledged "violence" was still being employed to root out a secret apparatus of CIA, KGB and Vietnamese infiltrators in Cambodia, but that it was to "(make) sure that the chains which had previously held the people in bondage would never be forged again."

The following are scans of a photocopy of the Forward, Introduction and first two chapters of 'Kampuchea: A photo-record of the first American visit to Cambodia since April 1975,' which contain Klein's observations and impressions of the state of the country and people as well as several interesting photographs by Brown of an almost empty Phnom Penh.

One might say that these men were naive, duped, perhaps blinded by their ideology, but I find it difficult to understand how they could see child soldiers carrying AKs as big as themselves, masses of black clad people toiling in the mud like ants and a capital city devoid of occupants three years after the takeover and not catch a hint that something might be amiss.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Page 4: Colonial villa on Sothearos Blvd opposite National Museum?

Dan Burstein with Iang Sary, April 28, 1978

Page 27: Former American Embassy, northeast corner of Norodom Blvd. and Mao Tse Toung Blvd.

Page 31: Corner of Norodom Blvd and Street 130, northwest corner

Page 32: Looking east down Street 154 from the corner of Norodom Blvd. and Street 154.
Page 33: Looking south down Monivong Blvd from corner of Monivong and Street 114

Page 34: Looking east on Street 118 from the corner of Norodom Blvd and Street 118.
Page 35: Southeast corner of Norodom Blvd and Street 118

(* There is some discrepancy regarding the length of the tour. Wikipedia [yes, I know it is an inherently dubious source] states that the tour lasted 8 days. But in his booklet 'Kampuchea,' David Klein states the group arrived in Phnom Penh April 12, but also dates one of the photos of Dan Burstein in the book April 28, indicating that the stay was longer than 8 days or perhaps that they toured at slightly different times or had overlapping tours. It may also be that the photo is incorrectly dated, or is not credited properly, perhaps taken by someone other that Robert Brown.)

Cambodia

Cambodia is Srok Khmer, the 'Land of the Khmer,' the primary ethnic group in the area since at least the Neolithic and an Indian influenced civilization with origins near 2000 years old. Centered on the lower Mekong and tributaries the Khmer people have dominated the region for millennia. From 2nd century AD Khmer kingdoms rose and fell, culminating in unification and the 500 year reign of the Angkorian Empire, the builders of the temples of Angkor near Siem Reap. The Empire stretched from Burma to the ocean. But by the 1400s Cambodia fell to centuries of change and decline squeezed between the expanding Siam and Vietnam. Colonized and by the French in the 1860s, independence 90 years later in 1954, a brief post-colonial 'golden period' under Sihanouk, coup in 70, civil war, fall to the communist Khmer Rouge in 75, 3 years 8 months 20 days of madness, Vietnamese rescue in 1979, occupation, low level war and international sanctions in the 80s, the UN, ostensive democracy and an adventure party destination in the 90s and now mainstreaming, tourism, rapid development, rapacious capitalism and NGOs, missionaries and other international busybodies aplenty.

Southeast Asia

As the term implies, Southeast Asia encompasses the southeastern corner of the Asian continent, loosely speaking, the area between India, China and Australia. It is made up of two distinct regions: the mainland zone, a bulbous peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean, bounded by China to the north and India to the west; and the insular (island) zone in the Pacific Ocean. The name 'Southeast Asia' is a comparatively recent invention, first coming into use into the 20th century and still a bit indefinite in definition. Mainland Southeast Asia is generally considered to include Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and peninsular Malaysia. The mainland is sometimes referred to as Indo-China though Indochina (Indochine) also designates the 19th/20th century French colonial conglomerate of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Sitting south of the Tropic of Cancer, most of mainland Southeast Asia lies in the hot, humid tropics and sub-tropics with a climate dominated by a monsoon cycle which divides the year into two distinct seasons: a dry season and an extremely wet monsoon season. Much of the mainland is mountainous and thickly jungled, with large river systems and wide, low-lying, flood-prone plains, much of which is, in modern times, deforested and blanketed with geometrical rice paddies. Several major river valleys including the Mekong River, the Red, Ma and Ka rivers and the group of rivers draining to the Chao Praya Delta played host to the rise of early civilization in the area. The Mekong River is one of the world's greatest rivers, the seventh largest on the planet, and since pre-history has been closely associated with the land of the Khmer.