U.S./Western Embrace of Pol Pot
By Edward S. Herman
The Times editorial of June 24 recognizes a small problem in pursuing Pol Pot, arising from the fact that after he was forced out of Cambodia by Vietnam, "From 1979 to 1991, Washington indirectly backed the Khmer Rouge, then a component of the guerrilla coalition fighting the Vietnamese installed Government [in Phnom Penh]." This does seem awkward: the United States and its allies giving economic, military, and political support to Pol Pot, and voting for over a decade to have his government retain Cambodia’s UN seat, but now urging his trial for war crimes. The Times misstates and understates the case: the United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot --- in one estimate, $85 million in direct support --- and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot’s forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia’s Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance—Carter’s National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."
In 1988-89 Vietnam withdrew its army from Cambodia, hoping that this would produce a normalization of relationships. Thailand and other nations in the region were interested in a settlement, but none took place for several more years "because of Chinese and U.S. rejection of any...move to exclude the Khmer Rouge. The great powers...continued to offer the Khmer Rouge a veto," which the Khmer Rouge used, with Chinese aid, "to paralyze the peace process and...advance their war aims." The Bush administration threatened to punish Thailand for "its defection from the aggressive U.S.-Chinese position," and George Shultz and then James Baker fought strenously to sabotage any concessions to Vietnam, the most important of which was exclusion of Pol Pot from political negotiations and a place in any interim government of Cambodia. The persistent work of the Reagan-Bush team on behalf of Pol Pot has been very much downplayed, if not entirely suppressed, in the mainstream media.
The Times has a solution to the awkwardness of the post-1978 Western support of Pol Pot: "All Security Council members...might spare themselves embarrassment by restricting the scope of prosecution to those crimes committed inside Cambodia during the four horrific years of Khmer Rouge rule." We must give the Times credit for semi-honesty in admitting that this is to avoid embarrassing the Great Powers. It is interesting, though, that the Times finds no real problem in the "dirty hands," and hypocrisy, so apparent in the lengthy support of war criminals, and that it offers no reflections on how "law and civilization" are served if the criminals were protected and supported for more than a decade by the forces of law and order.
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