Cambodian genocide denial

Cambodian genocide denial was the dispute among Western academics, journalists, and politicians about the character of the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Conservatives in the United States and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their belief that the victory of communist governments in Southeast Asian would lead to a "bloodbath." On the other hand, many Western scholars of Cambodia denied or minimized the human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary information as "tales told by refugees" and U.S. propaganda. With conclusive evidence of a massive number of deaths of Cambodians caused by the Khmer Rouge, denials and deniers disappeared, although disagreements concerning the actual number of Khmer Rouge victims have continued.

Background

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 17, 1975 and immediately ordered all the residents to evacuate the city. "Between two and three million residents of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other big towns were forced by the communists to walk into the countryside... without organized provision for food, water, shelter, physical security or medical care."^[1] The evacuation probably resulted in at least 100,000 deaths.^[2] The dispossessed urban dwellers were assigned to re-education camps or "New Settlements." Former government employees and soldiers were executed. Soon, according to journalists, Cambodia resembled "a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor."^[3]

The Khmer Rouge guarded the border with Thailand and only a few thousand refugees were able to make their way to Thailand and safety. As no Westerners were allowed to visit Cambodia, those refugees plus the official news outlets of the Khmer Rouge were the principal source of information about conditions in Cambodia for the next four years.

The STAV

Scholar Donald W. Beachler has described the late 1970s debate about the character of the Khmer Rouge. "Many of those who had been opponents of U.S. military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia feared that the tales of murder and deprivation under the Khmer Rouge regime would validate the claims of those who had supported U.S. government actions aimed at halting the spread of communism. Conservatives pointed to the actions of the Khmer Rouge as proof of the inherent evils of communism and evidence that the U.S. had been right to fight its long war against communists in Southeast Asia..." He concluded that "much of the posturing by academics, publicists, and politicans seems to have been motivated largely by political purposes" rather than concern for the Cambodian people.^[4]

Despite the eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion of the brutal first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of refugees, many academics in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia, and other countries portrayed the Khmer Rouge favorably—or, at least, were skeptical about the stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities. None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.

Some Western scholars believed that the Khmer Rouge would free Cambodia from colonialism, capitalism, and the ravages of American bombing and invasion during the Vietnam War. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-Khmer Rouge academics as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV). The STAV, which he said included among its adherents almost all Cambodian scholars in the Western world, "hoped for, more than anything, a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants, fighting imperialism, and revolution."^[5] Author William Shawcross was another critic of the STAV academics. Shawcross's views were endorsed and summarized by human rights activist David Hawk: the West was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia due to "the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories."^[6]

The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge heated up in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul in the popular magazine Reader's Digest. Based on extensive interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand, Barron and Paul estimated that, out of a total population of about 7 million people, 1.2 million Cambodians had died of starvation, over-work, or execution during less than two years of Khmer Rouge rule.^[7] Published about the same time was François Ponchaud's book, Cambodia: Year Zero. Ponchaud, a French priest, had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer. He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge. French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in the New York Times Review of Books on March 31, 1977.

Solarz hearing

On May 3, 1977, Congressman Stephen Solarz led a hearing on Cambodia in the United States House of Representatives. The witnesses were Barron and three academics who specialized in Cambodia: David P. Chandler, who would become perhaps the most prominent American scholar of Cambodia, Peter Poole, and Gareth Porter. Chandler and Porter agreed that the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities were much exaggerated.^[8] The most outspoken of the academics was Gareth Porter who had co-authored with George Hildebrand a highly positive book about the Khmer Rouge. Porter characterized the accounts of a million or more dead Cambodians as wildly exaggerated. He described the stories by refugees of Khmer Rouge atrocities collected by Barron and others as second-hand and hearsay. Asked for his sources, Porter cited the works of another adherent of the STAV, Ben Kiernan, an editor for a pro-Khmer Rouge publication in Australia. Porter never mentioned having spoken to any Cambodian refugees to evaluate their stories personally.

Solarz, who had visited Cambodian refugee camps and listened to refugees' stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, characterized Porter's views about the Khmer Rouge as "cowardly and contemptible" and compared them to the justifications of the murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler during World War II.^[9]

Chomsky

Linguist Noam Chomsky was among the academics who attempted to refute Barron, Paul, Ponchaud, and Lacouture. On June 6, 1977, he and his collaborator, Edward S. Herman, published a review of Barron and Paul's, Ponchaud's, and Porter's books in The Nation. He called Barron and Paul's book "third rate propaganda" and part of a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer Rouge. He said Ponchaud was "worth reading" but unreliable. Chomsky said that refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" as no independent verification was available. By contrast, Chomsky was highly favorable toward the book by Porter and Hildebrand, which portrayed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge as a "bucolic idyll."^[10] Chomsky also opined that the documentation of Gareth Porter's book was superior to that of Ponchaud's -- although almost all the references cited by Porter came from Khmer Rouge documents while Ponchaud's came from interviews with Cambodian refugees.^[11]

Murder of Malcolm Caldwell

Malcolm Caldwell was a British academic who wrote extensively about Cambodia, including, a few months before his death, an article in The Guardian denying reports of Khmer Rouge genocide.^[12] Caldwell was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers, two Americans, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, and Caldwell, to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978—nearly four years after the Khmer Rouge had taken power. The invitation was apparently an effort by Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, to improve the image of the Khmer Rouge in the West, now questioned by some of its former academic sympathizers.^[12] On December 22, Caldwell had a private meeting with Pol Pot and returned "euphoric" to the guest house in Phnom Penh where the three members of the delegation were staying. During the night Becker awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw a Cambodian man with a gun. Later that night she and Dudman were allowed by guards to venture out of their rooms and they discovered Caldwell's body. He had been shot and the body of a Cambodian man was also in his room.^[13]

The murder of Caldwell has never been fully explained. Four of the Cambodian guards were arrested and two "confessed" under torture. They said, "We were attacking to ruin the Khmer Rouge Party's policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world... it would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in support of our Party.... Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it." Whatever the motive behind Caldwell's murder, it seems highly unlikely that it could have occurred in tightly-controlled Cambodia without the involvement of high-level Khmer Rouge officials.^[12]

The impact of Caldwell's visit to Cambodia and his murder was muted by the invasion of Cambodia three days later, December 25, 1978, which soon ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Support for the Khmer Rouge in the Western academic community of Cambodian scholars quietly faded away. Peter Rodman, an American foreign policy expert and public official, stated that "When Hanoi [Vietnam] turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became respectable for many on the Left to 'discover' the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge-qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years.^[14]

The STAV disappears

With the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of incontestable evidence of KR atrocities, including mass graves, the "tales told by refugees" doubted by Western academics proved to be true. Some former enthusiasts for the Khmer Rouge recanted their previous views, others diverted their interest to other issues, and a few continued to defend the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky has continued to insist that his analysis was without error based on the information available to him at the time.^[15]

Gareth Porter signaled a revision in his views in 1978. In a caustic exchange with author William Shawcross in the New York Review of Books on July 20, 1978, Porter admitted that the "policy of self reliance" of the Khmer Rouge "has imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia." Shawcross acknowledged Porter's change of view, but added that he should "be a little more careful before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of intellectual dishonesty."^[16]

Australian Ben Kiernan, recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979. He admitted that he had been "late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in Cambodia....and "wrong about...the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973."^[17]

In the opinion of one scholar, the genocide deniers and doubters among academics may have been motivated more by politics than a search for the truth, but conservatives who "embraced the reports" of Khmer Rouge atrocities had no less "cynicism or naiveté" in later downplaying reports of atrocities by anti-communists in Central America.^[18]

Disputing the number of Khmer Rouge victims

Estimates of the number of Cambodians who died during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule have been controversial and range from less than one million to more than three million. Kiernan, head of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University, estimated that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for 1.5 million deaths and later raised that estimate to 1.7 million. His deputy, Craig Etcheson undertook the most complete survey of mass graves and evidence of executions in Cambodia and concluded in 1999 that the KR may have executed as many as 1.5 million people and as many as another 1.5 million died of starvation and overwork. Kiernan criticized Etcheson for "sloppiness, exaggerating a horrific death toll", and "ethnic auctioneering." Etcheson's report was removed from the web site of the Cambodian Genocide Project.^[19]

References

External links

• Cambodian Genocide on the Combat Genocide Association website