“Intervention in Cambodia: A Double-Edged Sword”

8/11/2019 Intervention in Cambodia: A Double-Edged Sword

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intervention

in Cambodia:

A Double-Edged

Sword

Sophal

Ear

Supi1al Fur

is

an Assistant Professor o/National Security Affairs at the

US

Noval postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He was a TED Fellow in 2009

Fulhright Specialist in 2010. and was honored

IS

a Young Global Leader in

2011

hy the World Economic Forllm. A graduate 0/

UC

Berkeley and

Princeton

University. Sophal moved to the United States/rom France

as (/

Camhodian

re.filgee at the age

0/10.

Introduction and

Background

Cambodia, known as an Island of Peace

in

the

1960s, is

like any other

typical post-colonial country-groping its way through development-except

for one inconvenient truth: it suffered one of the worst abuses of humanity in the

20 h

Century. thanks to a fanatical Maoist group known as the Khmer Rouge,

when

1.7

million people or a quarter

of

the population died.

During the

\960s,

the economy was strong--Cambodia exported more

rice

than

it

imported-- and

it

was such an example

of

development that even

Lee

Kuan Yew came to Cambodia to learn about nation-building after he led

Singapore as a self-governing state. Paradoxically, it was during this time that a

war raged on next-door

in

Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia

by

American B-525 would start. More

bomb

s fell on Cambodia

in

subsequent y

ears

than all of World War Europe. Little did anyone know what future decades

w\'ldd hold for this Island of Peace.

Coming from Cambodia,

I'd

like to frame this in a more personal context

and share a bit about my family. My late mother was born

in 1936

and

had

a

typical Cambodian childhood. She had seven years' schooling but learned

e v e r l l n g u g e s throughout her life, one of which was Vietnamese.

t would

prove to be extremely useful and important to her later in her life, the lives of

Illy four surviving siblings, and my own.

I was born

in

late 1974. Within months, the Khmer Rouge came to power.

Their rule resulted in a complete reordering

of

society, a literal reboot to Year

Zero when money was banned and all one could own was a spoon . Descri

bing

the Khmer Rouge, Michael Paterniti has written :

Once upon a lime-

19

7

5.

actually.

in Camhodia-there

was a regime

so

( vil that

it

created an antisociety where torture was currency and music .

hooks. and love were abolished. This regime

ruled/or

Ollr years and

lIIurdered nearly

2

million oOts citizens. a quarter

of

he population

Paterniti could not have formulated a better description.

My parents lived

in

Phnom Penh, the capital

of

Cambodia, and when

the

Sophal Ear

Khmer Rouge entered (sullen but resolute

in

their quest to cull from the country

all bourgeoisie), Mom and Dad. along with over two million other residents

were

forcibly relocated to the countryside. There, they were made to work in

rice tie Ids like water buffalos and to contribute the ir labor and ene rgy for the

greater good of this anti-society. As a Western academic apologist of the

Khmer Rouge lamented,

What the urban dwellers consider hard lahor may not he punishment or

community service beyond human endurance .. , Such associations [with

memories it invokes

of

Russian history] take what

is

happening in

Cambodia out

of

ts historical and cultural contex/

2

What other Solzhenitsyn Gulag-like context could there be?

One

can only

think

of the Cultural Revolution

in

China. The end-result of this revolution was

that one

in

four Cambodians died (possibly even three, depending on the actual

population

of

Cambodia at the time, a number that remains disputed) , including

my

own father of malnutrition and dysentery and my oldest brother, who has

been missing since 1975.

The death of what is now generally agreed to be 1.7 million people was due

to direct state violence resulting

in

genocide and crimes against humanity.

The

policy

to empty cities, which the Khmer Rouge ruthlessly implemented on

17

April

1975, led to famine as a result

of

botched agrarian policy and massive

deaths

from treatable diseases.

My

wife's own father was picke d-up by the

commune chief one day and told that he would be g oing to a nearby village. In

fact,

he

was taken away and beaten to death. A boy who spied for the Khme r

Rouge

reported this to other

commune

members, who then sent word to Illy

mother-in-law.

My

wife's father had been targeted from the get-go, made to

clean

human and animal waste because he had been skilled at injecting

prescribed med icine during the

ancien regime.

It

is estimated that

of

the

400

to

600

legal professionals

in

existence before

Democratic Kampuchea, only six to twelve survived.

3

(In Cambodia, they really

d

id kill all the lawyers. ) Examples of state aggn:ssion, oppression, and

personal

and economic rights infringements in Cambodia include, for example,

the

banning of private property (except for

one's

spoon) and the destruction

of

fam ilies by systematically breaking-up children from parents and teaching them

to respect the Angka (the Khmer Rouge organization) above all. Individual

and

societal effects

of

his state aggression include post-traumatic stress and a

local disinclination towards confrontation with the state even decades later, lest

one disappear. Ignorance, or feigning ignorance, meant survival. Questioning

lIulhority (or even wearing spectacles) meant death.

SlIpport for

the Khmer Rouge

Despite the death toll, the Western academic quoted earlier was not alone

and

not

the exception in her support. Another was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer

at

the School

of

Oriental and African Studies at the University

of

London. He

w s

an ardent supporter of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge's top leader, and visited

Democ ratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia had been rechristened during the Khmer


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Why Peace

Rouge

5

reign. Ironically, he was murdered on Christmas day, 1978, the

very

night after he personally interviewed Pol Pot.

In

a conference that took place

in

Stockholm, Sweden, from 17-18

November 1979, following the invasion of Cambodia and ouster ofthe Khmer

Rouge by the Vietnamese government, participants met to discuss how

the

Khmer Rouge could return to power and be rid

of

Vietnam. A speaker at the

conference named George Hildebrand had collaborated with Gareth Porter on

one

of

the first books on the Khmer Rouge Revolution, entitled Cambodia:

,,, rarvation and Revolution (New York : Monthly Review Press). This 1976

book

presented the Khmer Rouge in a positive light. Replete with propaganda pictures

from the Khmer Rouge,

it

even justified the forced evacuation of hospital

patients from Phnom Penh. Noam Chomsky cited the Porter and Hildebrand

book favorably, describing it as:

... a carejillly documented study of he destructive American impact on

Camhodia and the success of he Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming

it giving a very favorable picture of heir programs nd policies, based

on

a wide range of ources.

4

(Later, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge

regime was guilty

of

mass killings and mass starvation.)

The conference included a Khmer Rouge delegation headed by leng Thirith,

the Minister

of

Social Affairs for Democratic Kampuchea. Her husband,

leng

Sary,

was

Foreign Minister

for

Democratic Kampuchea. After three decades of

freedom and wealth, both now await trial

at

the Khmer Rouge Tribunal taking

place near Phnom Penh.

Passport to Freedom

Returning to the personal, the only reason that

my

four siblings and I are

alive today

is

because my mother spoke Vietnamese, and was able to use th t

language as a passport to freedom. At the time,

my

mother received

word

that

she would be able to leave Cambodia if she could prove that she was a

Vietnamese national. She decided to pretend being Vietnamese. Her Vietnamese

was so bad that she had originally given all the boys girls' names and all the

girls boys' names. f

t

were not for a Vietnamese lady whom she had

befriended. who told her of this mistake, we would all have been sent

to

the

gallows. With this Good Samaritan's assistance, my mother was tutored for dm

days in the repatriation camps at Koh Thom and Koh Tiev before each of

her

language interviews. In retrospect, this woman was an intervener. Because ofher

kindness, my mother was able to pass two exams, one by the Khmer

Rouge

and

one by the Vietnamese cadres, to prove herself as Vietnamese.

But the intervening did not end there. After Vietnam, we planned on

traveling to France, but to get to France was another incredible experience

involving the kindness

of

others,

in

particular, a Frenchman named

Bernard

.

Guyader. A distant cousin, who was a starving Parisian student, had the diftkuk

task of getting us to France, even though he had no means of doing so. He hid 1

find someone to run the paperwork and also locate another person

who

had

th

same last name as

my

mother, to prove some kind of familial relationship

in

Sophal Ear

order for us to be sponsored to go to France. One day, despondcnt, he bUlllped

into Bernard who in tum cared enough to intervene. He helped my family with

the

paperwork and found the needed individual with the same last name

as my

mother. Bernard persuaded her to sign the paperwork and mail

it,

but they got

lost in

the mail. He simply forged the signature

the

second time around. (When

the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already locked

its

gate at the close

of

business,

Bernard simply hopped over it to gain access to the counter,

whereupon he declared that by his watch

it

wasn't yet closing time.)

Human Rights and ntervention for Peace

But how does this personal history and experience particularly relate to the

human

condition, human rights, and intervention for peace? Forming the base

of

my

experience is the idea that without human rights defenders, or interveners, I

and countless millions would not be here today

For

those who have not shared similar experiences to my own, I have

another angle to relate to: natural rights. Natural rights are essentially rights that

you

are born with, that are natural to you, and not necessarily given by a

government.

These rights are, for example, captured in the ideas of life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness and all men are created equal, S enshrined

in

America s Declaration of Independence.

Tip O'Neill's adage that All politics

is

local

is

also useful. If

we

look back

to the 1950s

and I 960s and the great Civil Rights Movement that sprouted then.

we can see that it was certainly a period that highlighted the injustices of J m

Cro

w laws that kept races separate but equal. Equality under the law cannot he

separated.

Human rights can seem like something foreign, but

in

fact, human rights as

exp

lained

in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sound strikingly

familiar:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights .,,6

Natura

l rights are civil rights which

in

tum are human rights.

As

citizens

of

he

world, the global becomes the local and vice-versa. Events that happen

Ihousands of miles away from

us

still have

an

impact on us.

As

much as

we

ma y

think out of sight, out of mind,

we

now live in a global village, and what

happens in

Darfur does not stay

in

Darfur. t happens to all of us . And , when

indiv iduals are aggressed against there, it is equally unjust and harmful.

George McGovern, who was the Democratic Party's candidate for the 1972

presidential

election,

had

opposed the Vietnam War .

He had

a

firm

anti-war

Slance . However, he strongly advocated humanitarian intervention in Cambodia

whe:n he realized what the Communists had wrought to the country. He firmly

believed that the rise

of

the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs

of U.S. involvement in Indochina. 7 As sovereign rulers, the murderous Khmer

Rouge regime killed Cambodians under the lawful backing of the international

syste

m,

which turned a blind eye to abuses happening inside Cambodia. What is

now happening in North Korea is

no

different.


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Why Peace

Conclusion

Cambodia's story is a cautionary tale

o

antagonists and protagonists when it

coilles to intervention. While some academics have checkered pasts

with respect

to Cambodia, encouraging intervention

by

the Khmer Rouge to reorder society

into an agrarian utopia, they have long been forgotten. Some, like Ben Kieflll l,

have apologized and have gone

on

to become celebrated leaders in

genocide

studie:> . Other paid

with

their lives. The Good Samaritan story that is really my

life

story shows that were it not for strangers along the way, and their pe

rsonal

interventions, it would be impossible for me to write these words today.

Acknowledgements: .lim Chhor

and

Richard Chhuon provided excellent

research assistance. The views expressed are Sophal Ear's alone, and

do

not

reflect the views

of

he Department

of

he Navy or the Department ofDefense.

I Michael Paterniti. Never Forget , GQ, July 2009. Available:

http://

www

.gq.com/news-po I ticslbig-issues/200907/

cam

bodia-khmer-rouge

m ichael-paterniti

: Laura Summers, Defining the Revolutionary State

in

Cambodia, Current

History,

December 1976

p.

216.

3 Neilson, Kathryn E. They Killed All the Lawyers: Rebuilding the Judicial

System

in

Cambodia. CAPI Occasional Paper #13 . Victoria: Centre for Asia

Pacific Initiatives, 1996.

4 Chomsky did this

with

Edward Herman repeatedly. First in an article in

he

Nation entitled Distortion at Fourth Hand on 25 June

1977

and

then

in 1979

in

their book After the Cataclysm : PosMar Indochina the Reconstruction of

//II[ erialldeology (South End Press) on page 161.

) Preamble to the Declaration

o

Independence. Available:

http:

//www .archives.gov/exh ibits/charters/declaration_ ranscript.html

(> Article 1o the Universal Declaration o Human Rights. Available:

http: //www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml

Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America

and

the Age ofGenoci

de

,

Harper Perennial Edition, 2007,

p. 133.


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