Blowback - S5 Episode 9 - "Le Cercle Rouge"

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Vietnam ends Democratic Kampuchea and the US backs the Khmer Rouge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

There's a resolution going around the U.N. Security Council tonight written by non-aligned countries and calling for all foreign forces to leave Cambodia. The resolution does not name Vietnam, but that's what it means. The Security Council may vote on it Monday and Russia will surely veto it. When the Khmer Rouge were swept from power in 1979, Cambodian Prince Noradam Sianuk was freed from house arrest. The decision to release him, reportedly came at the urging of the Chinese government. But Sienouk was still handcuffed to the Khmer Rouge cause as a figurehead in a new struggle.

Paul Pott informed the Cambodian royal that his new assignment was to defend his country against the Vietnamese invaders at the United Nations. Upon his arrival at Peking, Prince Sionuk, perhaps the best-known Cambodian on the international scene, held an extraordinary five-hour press conference. I do not approve of the policy, the internal policy of Polok.

No, I do not approve of his internal policy. His policy of violation of human rights. But his external policy is good. His determination to defend our territorial integrity And national dignity, national independence is good. I approve of it. I will continue to support him. When the prince and his wife, Princess Monique, arrived in New York City in January 1979.

He was the freest he'd been in many years. China was paying his $1,200 a day tab for a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. and 10 blocks away at the Security Council, Sienouk lobbied hard for the United Nations to condemn the military occupation of Cambodia, launched by Vietnam. The debate on Cambodia has been going on for three days now, and Richard Hunt has this late report on it. Prince Norahdum Sienok, who has been king, prime minister,

and elected chief of state in Cambodia is now a prosecutor, accusing Vietnam of invading his country and the Soviet Union of supporting that invasion. At the United Nations, writes journalist Nayan Chanda. Quote, Sianuk met old friends and made new ones. But despite Sianuk's impressive anti-Vietnam bombast from the lectern in New York, the prince and his wife were far more interested

in getting out of the orbit of the Khmer Rouge. Chanda has more. Quote, it had become clear that his missing children and his sister-in-law and her husband had been liquidated by the Khmer Rouge. Talking to diplomats, journalists, and Khmer compatriots, Sionuk came to grasp the magnitude of what had happened in Cambodia. His personal agony and the condemnations he faced as representative of Paulepot

were added to grave personal loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Sionuk was still a prisoner. Three Khmer Rouge cadres, who had accompanied him from Phnom Penh. not only shadowed him in his every public appearance, but even shared the hotel suite with Sianuk and his wife. On Saturday, January 13, 1979, while standing in an elevator, Sionuk slipped a note to Secret Service agents.

It read, Dear Inspector, I request the help of your team to free me from the control of the Khmer Rouge, who are now staying with me at the Waldorf Estoria. Tonight, exactly at two in the morning, I will surreptitiously leave my suite, alone with a suitcase. Please be kind to take me in a car directly to the office of Mr. Andrew Young, the permanent ambassador of the U.S. at the United Nations. Many thanks.

When handed the note, a shocked Andrew Young passed it along to Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and his deputy, Richard Holbrook. Holbrook, later recalled, we decided to do a little cloak and dagger operation in the middle of the night. Cianook successfully made his 2 a.m. rendezvous. The American message to Cianuk conveyed later in the day by Andrew Young was, Defect if you want to, but why don't you think it over for a while? Once a person defects and loses his identity, he loses his usefulness as a political leader.

My government has requested me to come here in order to pay homage to the United Nations first and second to the United States. Speak about this luxem. Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 5, Episode 9, Le Sec Le Rouge, the Red Circle. Last time, the tensions between the Khmer Rouge and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. exploded into a border war, launched by Democratic Campocia, which in turn escalated into a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The government of Pol Pot, Yangt, Suri, Qusampan, and the rest

was driven out of Phnom Penh within a matter of weeks. And with it, the nearly four-year reign of nonstop violence, torture, and forced labor was at an end. In this episode, we'll witness what came after. the Khmer Rouge, how the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia and dismantled democratic Campuchia, how they struggled to rebuild their neighboring country, which had been so thoroughly ravaged by the American War and the reign of what was now called the Pulpott-Yengsari gang. Famine loomed over the land, a government had to be organized from scratch, and perhaps most ominously, the Khmer Rouge were down but not out.

and regrouping in the West, along the border with Thailand. The diplomatic breakthrough between the U.S. and China, engineered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger years earlier, had by now morphed into a pact to crush the mutual nuisance of Vietnam. President Jimmy Carter, who had entered office determined to normalize relations with Hanoi, had given up on those tough negotiations for the much greater prize of, securing commercial ties with a post-Mao China. And the hawks in his administration, led by National Security Advisor Zbigno Brzynski, known as the Bleeders, had a plan to bleed Vietnam.

Through secret channels, Washington and Beijing would support the return of the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia, and support Pol Pot's forces as a new nationalist insurgency. The Khmer Rouge, in turn, would drop its socialist iconography, and, as Pol Pot put it, turn to the west and follow their way. pulpit team. I am very hate. I do not want you to be involved again in the governmental affairs of my country. But as a citizen, as a patriot, I will speak out. I will speak out against the Vietnamese aggressors. During Prince Sienuk's attempt to secure asylum in America,

he checked in to Lenox Hill Hospital to sit tight and review his options should the Americans say no, which they did. Cyrus Vance, U.S. Secretary of State, soon paid the Prince a visit. The Secretary of State said the Prince was free to hang around in the U.S. as a guest, but he did not mention asylum. Why risk upsetting America's more important friends? The Americans, as good friends do, told the Chinese government early on

about Sienuk's attempt to defect. At first, Beijing's response was, the prince can do what he wants. But the Chinese and Washington were both queasy about losing such a valuable political asset. In fact, even their enemies in Hanoi valued Sianuk's political standing. The Vietnamese had sent him an offer to return to Phnom Penh as the head of their new allied government.

So, China's Deng Xiaoping, the pro-Western anti-Vietnamese leader now coming to power, squeezed in a meeting with Sianuk, who was brought down to Washington for the secret confab. though Deng was alarmed by Sionuk's open criticism of the Khmer Rouge, he admitted to the prince that, quote, we Chinese must confess that we do not appreciate some aspects of Paul Potts policy. He is too tough, end quote. Deng told Sianuk that he should come back to Beijing. Sianuk there wouldn't be under the control of the Khmer Rouge,

and China, which had, after all, pushed for his release, had once been a second home for him and would lose face if Sionuk had relocated to the United States. And, writes Chanda, Dung also promised to use his good offices to urge the Khmer Rouge to search for Sianuk's missing children, grandchildren, and relatives. Sionuk accepted the offer. The minor diplomatic crisis that began

with his note in the elevator, was now over. But the prince's optimism for a quiet sojourn in China, as Nyanchanda puts it, was mistaken. A dramatic new plan to punish Vietnam for throwing out the Khmer Rouge was only just beginning. After seizing Phnom Penhapen in early January 19th, Vietnam was now the political and military power in Cambodia. Its troops were welcomed and celebrated by the desperate and exhausted masses of Cambodians.

Whatever natural xenophobia that Pol Pot and his comrades had counted on to mobilize the population against the notorious Vietnamese hordes failed to materialize. In fact, as the people welcomed foreign troops, some took revenge on the fleeing Khmer Rouge forces. One of Paul's secretaries, reports journalist Philip Short, was stunned by the reception villagers gave the Khmer Rouge. They hated us, he said. They just wanted us gone.

There were cases of individual soldiers who became separated from their comrades being disarmed and beaten to death. and of revenge killings of local Khmer Rouge officials, end quote. A Cambodian waiter told journalist William Shawcross that when the Vietnamese invaded, he'd heard of one or two Khmer Rouge killed in revenge by women with their bare hands. But with Democratic Campuchia in tatters,

the overwhelming desire inside Cambodia was for calm, stability, peace. And the Vietnamese knew it. Declaring a new People's Republic of Campuchea, they began breaking apart the systems that had been put in place by the Khmer Rouge and began setting up a new government. At its head would be Heng Sam Rhin, a defector of Democratic Campuchia from the eastern zone

who had fled to Vietnam in 1978, where he had helped organize an opposition front against the Khmer Rouge. Hung would serve as Hanoi's man in Phnom Penh for the next several years. Washington's immediate reaction to the toppling of the Khmer Rouge was to condemn Vietnam and mobilize a global campaign against Hanoi. Internationally, right Grant Evans and Kelvin Rally, most governments try to punish post-Polpott Cambodia, as well as Vietnam for the overthrow of Pol Pot's government.

The People's Republic of Campocia was denied normal commercial as well as diplomatic relations with Western countries, end quote. Japan and the Europeans immediately cut off economic aid to Vietnam, report Shawcross, and the United States moved to restrict those few loans that had already been extended by international institutions such as the IMF and other projects funded by the United Nations. the campaign against Vietnam and the new Cambodian government would not stop here. And the message is getting through. African, Asian, and Latin American speakers have paraded to the microphones

to denounce outside interference in Cambodia's affairs as Ambassador Leon and Dong of Gabon did today. United States Ambassador Andrew Young has been willing to let others denounce Vietnam. He spoke briefly today. community cannot allow to pass in silence the acts that have just taken place. To do so will only encourage governments in other parts of the world to conclude that there are no norms, no standards, no restraints. Other plans call for freedom of movement and religion.

Both freedoms reportedly denied under the Camel Rouge and a provision for a return to the cities, which were evacuated after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. On January 1st of 79, reports Wilfred Burchett, the Vietnamese-backed government had already begun implementing policies of post-Cemar Rouge Cambodia. Quote, there was nothing very revolutionary about them. They included freedom of movement, including the right of all people to return to their original homes and villages,

the election of management committees at factories and cooperative farms, freedom of religion and the reintroduction of education and public health services. An amnesty was pronounced for officials and troops of the Khmer Rouge regime who gave themselves up. They too were free to return to their home villages, end quote. William Chaucross, on the other end of the ideological spectrum from Birchid, agrees, quote, for the overwhelming majority of the Cambodian people, The invasion meant freedom. In the weeks that followed, the roads of Cambodia were filled with hundreds of thousands of people

crossing and crisscrossing the country. Thin, poorly dressed, often with no possessions at all, they were searching among the awful wreckage of recent years for their families, for friends, for their old villages, for some traces of the past on which to build the future. Behind the scenes, of course, the Vietnamese would hold the reins of power. There were all too few Cambuchians they could train and trust as collaborators. On the other side of things, this was still a military occupation, and the Vietnamese ran a tight ship. Nothing like the Khmer Rouge, of course, but they were hardly ready to hand over the keys to Cambodians right away.

Quote, the new government promised to respect human rights, rights historian, David Chandler, including freedom of opinion and association, but it treated political opponents severely as all earlier regimes had done. No elections were held until 1981, and even those were not contested by opposing parties. The order of the day was economic, social, and political recovery. But there were massive obstacles. Villages and towns were ravaged from the latest war, The roads were dilapidated. There were almost no functioning vehicles left. The country had one ambulance to its name.

There were shortages of drugs and medicine. One correspondent from Ajean's France Press reported, The Cambodia that survived Pol Pot is like a dismembered body trying to return to life. Its economy is shattered, its communications severed. Millions of acres of rice patties have been abandoned. In Penhompin itself, there is no drinking water, no post, or telephone, no transport, no registry office, no money, no markets. The city is so silent that birdsong has a sinister ring to it. End quote. Most ominously, there was the threat of famine. The country had been whittled to a thread

over the past four years, and food was truly scarce, especially with an occupancy. army to feed. In Cambodia, the main crop of rice, the nation's key crop, is planted in May during the wet season. That rice gets harvested in the wintertime when seeds for a smaller but still important crop are planted for early spring. After the Vietnamese invasion, with thousands, if not millions, resettling and relocating all over the country, this harvest was ignored. What's more, in large swaths of the country, reports Elizabeth Becker.

Quote, many Cambodians celebrating the Vietnamese's expulsion of the Khmer Rouge, broke into granaries left behind by the Khmer Rouge, and put on feasts. Within a month, the new authorities warned that the quantity of rice available for the people is negligible, right Evans and Rowley. By July, they were warning of an impending famine in Cambodia in calling for urgent international aid. American officials attacked this statement as, quote, alarmist. UN and Red Cross officials went to investigate the situation

and were appalled by what they found. Hookworm, anemia, outbreaks of bubonic plague. Quote, still more ominous, very little of the following season's crop had been planted. Vast numbers of people were still roaming the countryside rather than settling down to productive activity, and there were few tools and livestock, end quote. By winter, thousands of tons of food, not to mention medicines and the technicians needed to administer them,

were flowing into the country from the Soviet bloc countries. It was a different story for Washington, right Evans and Rowley. Although U.S. officials in Bangkok pointed to the gravity of the situation, their superiors in Washington were initially opposed to any Western effort to aid Cambodia at all. The USA had by now launched a campaign to persuade the Western countries to, quote-unquote, punish Vietnam by cutting off aid. A major aid project to Cambodia, under Vietnamese occupation, amounted to breaking the siege. officials in Washington tried to discount reports from Thailand that food shortages in Cambodia were reaching crisis proportions.

End quote. Journalist Elizabeth Becker spoke to us about the U.S. campaign to turn the screws on Cambodia and therefore, Hanoi. So this country has barely survived, famine, deprivation, the death of almost. a quarter of their people, and what does the West do? And their Southeast Asian neighbors, they turn their back on them. And they say, I'm sorry, we're going to be part of this whole isolation. We're going to isolate Cambodia.

After the Khmer Rouge had isolated Cambodia, now the Westerners isolate Cambodia. William Shawcross, whose book Sideshow we've drawn from extensively this season, wrote a follow-up book about the years of Vietnam's occupation. By the 1980, Shawcross himself had taken on an anti-communist outlook and laid much of the blame of the famine on Hanoi. He reported that the Vietnamese and their men in Phnom Penh attempted to hide or obscure the crisis and actively prevented the West from getting any aid inside. Quote, the most important factor was that neither the Vietnamese government nor its client in Phnom Penh,

was urgently or effectively seeking massive food aid for Cambodia in the spring of 79, end quote. Evans and Rowley dispute this, pointing out that the new government warned in February that, quote,

the quantity of rice available for the people was negligible. By July, they continue, Hanoi was warning of an impending famine in Cambodia and calling for urgent international aid, which Shawcross does admit. Judging by the first formal letter to the Red Cross from Vietnam in September, the Cambodian leaders and their Vietnamese allies were chiefly

concerned about the West's ulterior motives inside the country, specifically seeking to deny support for the Khmer Rouge areas. In any case, international relief agencies did end up in the middle of the sniping between the Western governments and Phnom Penh, which in the fall granted approval for large-scale relief operations in Cambodia. But the Americans had won the tug of war. Aid would flow to Khmer Rouge insurgents as well. Now President Jimmy Carter announced a $70 million aid program to Cambodia to prevent, quote, a tragedy of almost genocidal proportions. He used the word again in November when he accused the People's Republic of Cambodia of genocide. The Western press, especially the press in America, got the message

and began calling out what they saw as the heirs of Nazi concentration camps, not the Khmer Rouge, but the Vietnamese. But from Hong Kong, ABC News's bureau chief threw some cold water on this stuff. No competent observer, they reported, has concluded that the bottlenecks are the result of conscious Vietnamese or Cambodian policy. Instead, they say, the delays are caused by a complex bureaucracy, inexperienced and inefficient administrators, lack of transport, and primitive communication, end quote. In the end, Wright Evans and Rowley, even the U.S. ambassador to Thailand admitted that there was no evidence

that the Vietnamese or Penhompan authorities were blocking the distribution of aid. Using back of the napkin math, Shawcross calculates that the aid to Cambodia was disproportionately spent on the Thai border and the areas under Khmer Rouge control, which, as we'll see, was still the recognized government

thanks to a Sino-American campaign at the UN. An average of $1,124 per head was spent on refugees inside Thailand, $439 ahead on those who came to the border area, and $48 ahead on those who stayed inside Cambodia. Add Rowley and Evans, quote, such a lopsided pattern of spending clearly served to draw people out of Cambodia to the border into the the orbit of the Khmer Rouge and their co-opposition, end quote. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other socialist countries sent all aid directly to Cambodia's capital. Cuba, in particular, sent its highly esteemed medical personnel in a much-needed effort

to rebuild the health care system. So I was there off and on during this time. Nobody could understand the world's response. nobody could the big deal was to be able to get to Cuba to get some studies in they were learning Spanish instead of French

every time I went back it was a slightly better but you can see the horror it was almost like they were living it was temporary you had a total sense of temporary there wasn't enough food

there wasn't enough medicine they tried to rebuild education but they kept being blocked. Friends who could left, the best left, because there's so little to stay for. In 1961, Mao Zedong boasted to a visiting British general, quote, we are Marxist-Leninist. Our state is a socialist state, not a capitalist state.

Therefore, we wouldn't invade others in 100 years or even 10,000 years, end quote. His successors, write Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, proved him wrong within three years of his death, end quote. We have been giving the Kampuchans all kinds of material assistance, but they don't need any advisors. The message seemed clear. Arms and supplies, but no commitment of advisors, presumably meaning that China will not intervene with troops.

The scene is late January, 1979. China's vice-premier, Deng Xiaoping, is visiting Washington for a very special and very secret meeting with President Jimmy Carter. In an interview with us, the historian Vu Min Huang told us about this moment. China was already very unhappy with Vietnam. So, Deng Xiaoping had, you know, he was always going to visit Washington, D.C., and then make a trip through the United States in January, 1979, because the two sides had agreed on a historic normalization of relations.

It was supposed to be a big celebration in Washington, D.C., after the, parties and gala. Deng Shelfing told President Jimmy Carter, hey, I need a private meeting after this. It's very important. Only bring, you know, they're closer circle, people that really

trusts. And they had that meeting in the White House later that night. And Carter was like, what's so important? And Deng Shepin presented him with the specific plans for a putative invasion of Vietnam that would last

exactly a month. So the Chinese very much, it was very well planned. It was very specifically planned. And they were always going to retreat. It was always just going to be a limited operation. He promised that to Carter. Carter said, this is shocking. I need a day to respond. The next day, Carter presented Dung with a nine-point argument against a punitive strike on Vietnam. In my opinion, he said, a concerted effort through the United Nations or other international fora could prove to be much more damaging to Vietnam and her allies. But Carter didn't change Dung's mind.

The ironic thing is that Dung was doing it for the United States. The United States did ask for it, but he did it for the United States in the sense that he believed this is what the United States needs. This is the sort of thing that would get the Americans. woken up to the threats of the Vietnamese and the Soviet Union, and they would eventually be happy with him. And so it's a very concluded way of thinking. It's almost illogical, but in some ways it worked.

In a radio, Hanoi broadcast tonight, Vietnam admitted Chinese troops are advancing. Several provincial capitals are threatened. Already two major Vietnamese towns are said to have been overrun, plus a spring of villages along the 500-mile border. The invasion formally began on February 17th, as China dispatched a quarter of a million troops across its border with Vietnam. Over the next two weeks,

they penetrated Vietnam to a depth of about 15 miles, writes Philip Short. By the time the last Chinese soldier withdrew a month later, the Vietnamese had lost 10,000 dead, their military infrastructure along the border, had been destroyed, and their already weak economy crippled, end quote. Clearly, China was retaliating for his Cambodia defeat a month earlier.

As far as political consequences went, the Soviet Union was discredited, writes short, as it had conspicuously failed to come to the aid of its ally. And in China, quote, the unsatisfactory performance of the Chinese army, which suffered 20,000 dead and wounded, enabled Deng Xiaoping to remove hundreds of leftist officers and to undertake the first fundamental reform of military policy since the 1940s. But China's actual stated reason for fighting the war? Punishing Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia?

That didn't work out. Not only did the Vietnamese expeditionary force remain in place, but in mid-March, as the Chinese invasion was underway, it launched a new offensive against Pol Pot's base in the West. The attack on Vietnam was a Chinese show of power against Hanoi, and by extension, Moscow. But the nascent Khmer Rouge guerrilla force, now supported by both Beijing and Washington, that was something else. That was the start of an insurgency.

The refugees on the border was a huge story. The story that the Americans heard mostly were about the refugees and how the United States was helping the refugees. There are very few stories about inside Cambodia. And the cliche was this was Vietnam's Vietnam, which is completely wrong. National Security advisors Bigno Brzynski had never held much interest in Indochial. China. That is, until he saw the Vietnamese invade Cambodia in Christmas of 78. The way

Brzynski saw the world, every socialist country or ally of the USSR, was not merely an ally, but a total puppet of the Soviet Union. The invasion of Cambodia was therefore, obviously, a Soviet plot to control Indochina. On the television program faced the nation, President Carter's national security advisors of Big Nev Brzynski was asked about the fighting between the two communist countries. I find it very interesting primarily as the first case of a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union. Do you think... The Vietnamese are clearly supported by the Soviets, politically and militarily,

and the Cambodians are supported politically and perhaps militarily by the Chinese. Do you have any intelligence that Russia... advisors are on the field, Chinese advisors? No, we do not. The Cambodians, however, claim that there are, and the fact that they're claiming it is itself politically important, even if untrue. And so, just as he would do a year later, when the Soviets themselves entered Afghanistan, Brzynski decided to make common cause with a band of local fanatics to punish the communists. In Afghanistan, as listeners will remember it would be the Mujahideen. In Cambodia, it would be, who else?

The Khmer Rouge. They publicly voted for the Khmer Rouge to keep their seat at the UN because they considered the Vietnamese occupation worse than what the Khmer Rouge did. Now, nowadays, it's appalling, and it was very hard to get people to understand how awful that was. Since the invasion, Pol Pot, Yengsuri, and Qusampan had slipped into bases in the west of Cambodia, along the border with Thailand, at times crossing over into Thailand proper, guests of the U.S. allied government. Many of their lieutenants remained in Cambodia in, quote, small isolated groups, hiding in the jungle, without contact among themselves,

and with no means of communicating with their leaders, right short. Now, with the Khmer Rouge leadership intact and regrouped, Brzynski's plan, the bleeder's prerogative could blossom. I encouraged the Chinese to support Paul Pot, Brzeinski later told Elizabeth Becker. I encouraged the Thai to help Democratic Campochea, Paul Potts government. In the spring of 1979, Brzynski says, he used the visit of Thailand's foreign minister to press forward his plans. The support from Bangkok that he secured was key. The border region with Thailand would serve as the base of the Khmer Rouge for the next several

years, again, not dissimilar to what the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan provided for the Mujahideen. and thus was sealed, as short puts it, a Faustian pact between the U.S., China, and the Khmer Rouge. This policy, much like Brzynski's pact with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, survived his administration and lasted for over a decade. Take it straight from Alexander Hague, the general who had once been Henry Kissinger's right hand, and who was made President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of state in 1981. Haig writes in his memoir that, quote,

we took the difficult decision to continue to support the Khmer Rouge resistance movement as a means of opposing the Vietnamese military presence in Campuchia. And it was with considerable anguish that we agreed to support, even for overriding political strategic reasons, this charnel face. In a sense, everything had formed a complete circle since back in 1975, Henry Kissinger had told Thailand's foreign minister that the U.S. would be open to working with the Khmer Rouge. Quote, you should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them, he said.

They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand. in our way. The assembly of a new Khmer Rouge army was no less grim than its old reputation would suggest. They built their forces out of the people trapped in the western areas under their control. One could see these soldiers emerge from the forests as, quote, walking skeletons, having survived on leaves and roots. Dysentery, malaria, and edema were rampant. The civilian population under Khmer Rouge control,

especially new people, to use the Khmer Rouge parlance, accompanying them against their will, they suffered even more. Tens of thousands starved. Quote, awful spindly creatures with no flesh and with wide vacant eyes, right Shawcross, stumbled out of the forests and the mountains into which the Khmer Rouge had corralled them. Only the movement's leaders and their senior aides ate well.

Those who remained civilians in the new Khmer Rouge areas fared no better. A team from UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, took a secret trip into these zones on the Thai border. What they saw of human misery surpassed even what their colleagues had seen in and around Phnom Penh, right, Shawcross. Quote, in this one area alone, there were about 10,000 people. They were mostly women, but with them were about 2,000 men and 2,000 children, in whom life barely flickered.

Some were undoubtedly families of Khmer Rouge soldiers. Others had been dragged by the Khmer Rouge into the mountains after the Vietnamese invasion. Almost all were suffering from a virulent strain of cerebral malaria, and all were terribly malnour. nourished. Last year, the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge and what was left retreated to the mountains of northwest Cambodia.

The secret camps can be reached only on foot, the command post constantly on the run. Throughout the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge operated once more as a guerrilla army. Its forces launched attacks on Vietnamese and Cambodian military units and also carried out massacres of civilian populations, including, yet again, specific attacks on ethnic Vietnamese in the country. They lay landmines across Cambodia, which blew people up just the same as those left over from the American War. Every now and again, the Vietnamese forces would land a blow against the Khmer Rouge insurgents and their fellow nationalist coalition partners, but with its leaders safely ensconced along the Thai border,

the movement could always melt back into the jungles. But here in his jungle hideout is the most hated man in Cambodia. Paul Potte, demoted now from prime minister, to simply commander of the guerrilla forces. Salas Saar, who had for years now gone as Pol Pot, once again changed his name, this time to Fem. With it, changed the entire ideological basis of the Khmer Rouge. We are abandoning the socialist revolution, said Yangt-Sari to the New York Times.

Pole himself remarked to a comrade, we have to turn to the west and follow their way. The new-look Khmer Rouge shed their black peasant garb right short. Quote, the troops now wore jungle green, courtesy of their Chinese allies, the cadre's white shirts, and dark trousers. Paul did the same, until he discovered the attractions of safari suits, which were made custom for him in Bangkok. He liked pastel colors,

especially pale blue, end quote. But not everything was coming up, Pol Pot. By the middle of the 80s, he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease and had to go to Thailand for medical treatments. With the Khmer Rouge insurgency making headway, he moved his base up to a scenic mountain ridge. He also decided to remarry. By this point, his wife Therith had completely succumbed to her schizophrenia,

writes Philip Short. Paul took a new bride, a young woman named Maya. During the summer of 84, he and his new bride toasted each other with orange juice. They would, by next spring, have a newborn daughter. End quote. In the only interview ever given to American television, Paul Pot outlined for ABC News producer Phil Lewis what he had hoped to accomplish in Cambodia. As Pol Pot's daughter entered the scene, one of his old enemies left it.

Lonnall, the once pious right-wing dictator of Cambodia, had fled in the aftermath of Khmer Rouge victory, first to Hawaii, then California. In 1985, he passed away from a heart condition at the age of 72. In interviews since his exile, wrote the L.A. Times, Lawnall expressed bitterness and said he still considered himself the Cambodian leader. Quote, the fact is, I am president of the Khmer Republic. End quote. The Vietnamese had the capital, but they were not able to dislodge the insurgent forces from the border areas.

In turn, the occupation, however welcomed at first, was beginning to lose. its sheen. Politics were back to life, and many resented the deep ties that the politicians in Phnom Penh had with Hanoi. This drove some in unsympathetic villages, despite everything over the past four years, to make a break for the Khmer Rouge controlled areas and sign up against the new government. As Big New Brzeinsky had said, the United States states could not be seen to be directly supplying the Khmer Rouge, but it could supply a nationalist umbrella coalition. But the Khmer Rouge was known to be by far the largest and most powerful member of that coalition. And as it happens, American aid did reach the Khmer Rouge directly.

Journalist Joel Brinkley reports, quote, over time charges made the rounds that some of the American aid, 215 million so far, was finding its way to the Khmer Rouge. Congress demanded an investigation. The State Department dispatched investigators to have a look. Sure enough, they found some leakage. But the head of the investigation played it down, asking, quote, isn't the larger objective here defeating the Vietnamese puppets in Phnom Penh? What the Khmer Rouge had done to their fellow Cambodians was so unspeakably cruel,

it is almost impossible to imagine that the world, especially the United States, would ever tolerate them in power again. This hour is about the return of the Khmer Rouge and American tolerance. Years later in 1990, Peter Jennings and his team at ABC aired a report, denied by the administration of George H.W. Bush that the United States had been and was still supporting the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese and its allied government in Phnom Penh. The U.S. is the largest donor of aid in these refugee camps.

In half a dozen such camps, U.S. aid is distributed through the United Nations, but the camps are controlled by the various Cambodian military factions, which means U.S. aid is going to the United Nations. military organizations, including the Khmer Rouge. In his report, Peter Jennings questions Assistant Secretary of State for George H.W. Bush, Richard Solomon, about America's relationship with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Why, in your view, is this working group covert in the first place? Why is it not open?

Well, here, I think the question has been answered. We don't get off into details. But you've no explanation of why the Cambodian the Cambodia working group must be covert. My guess is the host country doesn't really want to have foreign troops on its borders and would just as soon the problem went away. Is it also possible that because there is some involvement in the working group with the Khmer Rouge, not just with the non-communist resistance?

Well, again, I can't get off into details, much of which I'm not even aware of, frankly. In any case, the U.S. could rely on China and Thailand to support the Khmer Rouge on the military side. Far more valuable was the Americans' diplomatic support. At the UN General Assembly, the Khmer Rouge were still the official government representing Cambodia. The Vietnamese and Soviet bloc countries attempted to dislodge them, given that they had been driven from the capital and were now loathed by the vast majority of their countrymen. Yangtari, now donning a sharp double-breasted suit, simply smiled through the passionate attacks on him and his organization.

The bulk of Democratic Campocia's diplomatic support at the UN and elsewhere, writes Philip Short, came from capitalist countries, notably the United States and its allies, while the supply lines which kept the Khmer Rouge alive passed through pro-Western Thailand. most of the communist world, except China, was hostile to the Khmer Rouge cause. Beijing continued to partner with its American allies in blaming everything on the Soviets. The Chinese foreign minister told the UN Secretary General that, quote, the Vietnamese were the Cubans of Asia, but rather more dangerous, end quote. Delegates from the West and their allies in Asia,

insisted that while they were not great fans of the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam was an aggressive state bent on controlling the region, and its puppets could not be recognized. Less than a decade after the Americans had been driven out of Indochina, they now professed shock and horror at the idea of war and occupation in Indochina. Not to mention, Shaw Cross writes, If the Khmer Rouge were expelled, it would serve as a precedent that could see other states, such as the state of Israel, expelled on similar grounds,

which made more than a few delegates nervous for years to come. The United States threw its weight around again and again to preserve the Khmer Rouge credentials. After one of the votes, writes Chaucross, an American delegate, Robert Rosenstock, found someone shaking his hand with great enthusiasm. He looked up and saw that it was Yang Sari, grinning broadly. The ongoing war with the revitalized Khmer Rouge insurgency created a new refugee crisis. Thousands of people fleeing the violence spilled into Thailand.

Bangkok's response revealed its priorities. Tens of thousands were simply pushed back across the border. Sometimes this meant sending them back into the clutches of the Khmer Rouge. Sometimes it simply meant certain death. In the spring of 1979, nearly 2,000 refugees were scooped up by the Thai military. Despite informal protests by UN officials, writes Shawcross, they were driven to the border and forcibly handed over to anti-communist commercerey soldiers, guerrillas officially supported by the United States.

Quote, many of them were old people, women, and children. They were marched off into the forest at gunpoint. A week later, two men from the group escaped and told relief officials that 200 of the refugees had already died. A few months later, the Thai military carriages. carried out an operation in which refugees were bused into a mountain range on the border and told to march back into Cambodia. The passengers, far more of them women and children than men, were ordered to march, reported Henry Cam of the New York Times.

Quote, those who stalled or wanted to turn back were threatened with being shot. Shawcross describes what happened next. Quote, the path down the mountains became steeper, the jungle thicker. Dozens, scores of people fell onto landmines. Those with possessions had to abandon them to carry their children down. One group of refugees desperately pulled whatever valuables they had left, filled two buckets with them, and walked back up toward the Thai soldiers carrying a white flag. The soldiers took the buckets and then opened fire on the refugees. For days this operation went on. Altogether, between 43,000 and 45,000 people were pushed down the cliffs, end quote.

For its part, Bangkok drummed up public campaigns against the refugees. These people were, quote, conceived by U.S. policies during the 70-75 war, and were delivered by Vietnam, in the words of premier Krangsaq Chamanan. Why should they be left on our doorstep? Here in the wild west of Campocia, the camps were ruled by black marketeers and warlords. In a circus of hope and despair, they fought with each other and prayed on the refugees.

To add to the terror, there were also attacks on the camps by the Vietnamese army, the Thais, the Khmer Rouge, and rival guerrilla bands. This time the attack was launched from Thailand. The shelling continued for more than four hours. More than 100 civilians were killed. Many were children. The People's Republic of Campuchia had undeniable questions about the political basis on which this new state rested.

Quote, given the undeniable fact that this new government was being installed at the point of a Vietnamese bayonet, writes Craig Echison, a co-founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, one of the first problems facing the nascent regime was the challenge of establishing its own political legitimacy. Thus, in part to disassociate the new regime from the old in the eyes of Cambodians, the Vietnamese and their clients decided to hold a genocide tribunal.

It would be a quintessentially political piece of theater, and the process might even serve the cause of justice. End quote. We earn our... We'll never forget the horrible crimes of the genocide will never allow that nightmare to our return. Not long after the Vietnamese arrived, writes Becker, they used the papers and documents left behind by the Khmer Rouge to prosecute Paul and his clique. In April 1979, three months after dislodging the Khmer Rouge, the occupying Vietnamese covertly flew in legal experts from East Germany,

the German Democratic Republic. Quote, the Germans had prosecuted Nazi war criminals and had also conducted in absentia trials, so they had relevant experience to offer. The East German role would remain secret. So too would the Vietnamese role. end quote. The next month, following a secret Vietnamese order to form a, quote,

Cambodian judicial operations team, a plan came together. Bearing in mind that the new government and military was partly led by ex-officials of the Khmer Rouge, the tribunals, akin to the Nuremberg trials after World War II, focused primarily on the group of people who had led Democratic Campuchia. The moniker given to this group was the Pol Pot-Yeng-Sari clique or gang named after the Khmer Rouge's two most important leaders. In mid-July, the People's Republic of Campuchia,

or the PRK, formally announced that it planned to try the Pol-Pat-Yeng-Sari gang for genocide. The indictment itself reads, quote, The national economy has been destroyed, the national culture has been eradicated, and all social strata, all families, all regions,

the whole nation, have borne the disastrous consequences of the policy of genocide, of the Pol Pot Yeng Suri gang. End quote. Camer Rouge Radio, broadcast with Chinese support from outside Cambodia, replied with the claim that the trial was staged by a different gang. The Vietnamese, Le Duon, Fem van Dong gang. According to Etchison,

invitations brought reporters and lawyers to the trial from the United States, France, Germany, Britain, India, Mexico, Japan, Syria, Algeria, Laos, the Soviet Union, and, of course, Vietnam. Given a speaking rule at the proceedings, Ohio State University law professor, John Quigley, quote, offered his opinion on whether or not the crimes at issue constituted genocide. In his recollections of the tribunal, 21 years after the fact,

Quigley writes, quote, given the continuing threat the Khmer Rouge posed, a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders that would highlight their dangerousness held the promise of ending the civil war in which the country still found itself. the need to prove the victorious government's correctness was stronger than it had been for the Allies in World War II. Multiple witnesses gave accounts of seeing the Khmer Rouge feeding human flesh to crocodiles. One testimony described piles of bones left standing next to mass graves.

Another witness pointed out that some of the ditches in which the Khmer Rouge dumped bodies were originally, quote, quote, craters of bombs dropped in 1973 by the Americans, end quote. Witnesses testified to many of the crimes we've already described this season. Mass and spontaneous execution, torture, arbitrary detention, and too many others to name. The tribunal attracted coverage in the English language press, but little sympathy or interest from Western political leaders, or those in the third world who were supporting Beijing over Moscow.

The indictment's emphasis on Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge no doubt contributed to this, as did the fact that the two main defendants on trial, Paul Pot and Yang Sarie, were being prosecuted in absentia, represented by three court-appointed attorneys who never spoke with Paul or Yang. It was clear to Quigley that the trial,

tribunal was biased toward the prosecution. The presiding judge, Keochanda, was a minister in the new Cambodian government. Despite keeping quiet, Vietnam couldn't hide its obvious primary role in setting the whole indictment up. But Quigley knew that, quote, a number of ethnic minority groups had been targeted by the Khmer Rouge. Evidence also suggested that religious figures, including in particular Buddhist monks had been targeted.

The letter of the text of the 1948 genocide convention holds the crime of genocide to be actions committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, end quote. With that as the standard, Quigley writes, I was comfortable in giving my opinion to the tribunal that genocide had been committed by the two defendants. On August 19th, Judge Chanda announced that Pol Pot and Yang Surrey had been found guilty. The two men were not present, but they were sentenced to death. Quigley spoke with us about why, despite the trial's imperfections, he ultimately agreed with the verdict. When you have a government overthrow,

and the new government is conducting a trial of the predecessor leaders, you're not going to find any that are pristine in legal terms. And the Nuremberg proceedings are in some degree an example of that because the United States was anxious to show the American people why it had been necessary to send a large number of people to die fighting Germany, they wanted to show how bad the German government had been. And you have that in any situation of this sort. But it did seem to me that this made that trial important

beyond the question of who did what and who was guilty. under which article of the Genocide Convention, it was necessary to let the international public see what had happened because the United States was still supporting the Khmer Rouge, which was still fighting and which was still carrying out policies similar to what it had done while in power. Notwithstanding this moral and political victory, writes Etchison, the erstwhile convicts remained at large. They also remained armed and dangerous. The hope that the trial would

encourage a fracture in the top ranks of the Khmer Rouge proved illusory. Moreover, much of the international community was totally unimpressed by the spectacle of the People's Revolutionary tribunal, end quote. That fall, the UN General Assembly officially voted to seat the Khmer Rouge, the overthrown Cambodian government, instead of the PRK, now ruling from Phnom Penh. Today, Paul Pot lives here on the Thai-Cambodian border under the political protection of the Thai military. Though he has led the Khmer Rouge for almost 30 years, though he is the architect of Cambodia's genocide. There has been no American campaign to arresting. Some atrocities of the Khmer Rouge had been known to the outside world since the mid-1970s.

Although Democratic Campuchia had been kept under lock and key, stories from refugees, some exaggerated, some spot-on, painted a compelling, if-year-old. incomplete portrait of the horror. And yet, writes Elizabeth Becker, quote, the United Nations dropped its investigation into the gross human rights abuses committed by the Khmer Rouge. Just as the Khmer Rouge and not the PRK was recognized as the rightful Cambodian government, the case developed by human rights lawyers in Geneva, quote, was put aside with the simple statement that sovereignty was more important than human rights. In fact, the prevailing reason of the day was that if any proper tribunal were to happen, the Khmer Rouge would have to come

back to power. Becker continues, it was decided that the Khmer Rouge army would be needed to force the Vietnamese to retreat and negotiate a peace accord. If the Khmer Rouge were taken out of action, the reasoning went, and brought before an international tribunal, then the Vietnamese would never leave. All alternative scenarios, especially any, that included the trial of the Khmer Rouge in order to foster a sense of justice and self-confidence in Cambodians, were dismissed out of hand. It was argued that a trial should proceed after a peace accord, once the war was over, and the accused had been enticed into the peace agreement. The Reagan and Bush administrations that succeeded President Carter's

deliberately did not call the Khmer Rouge responsible for genocide. The United States, above all, writes Becker, wanted the Vietnamese occupation to be the only catastrophe under discussion and helped convince the international community to adopt this practical and thoroughly cynical stance. The United States hid behind irrelevant gestures of disdain. U.S. diplomats were forbidden to shake the hands of Khmer Rouge officials, and most U.S. speeches included some reference to the horrors of the past, but that had no bearing on the pursuit of the war, end quote. In his ABC report, Peter Jennings spoke to a critic of Washington's policy toward

the Khmer Rouge, Congressman from Massachusetts, Chester Atkins. The congressman's answer sums up our story. In your opinion, Congressman, why does the United States, the Bush administration, have anything to do whatsoever with the Khmer Rouge. It's a policy of hatred. Our policy is a policy that's really captured in time in the 1970s. We're still fighting the Vietnam War, and this is the last battle of that war,

and if we have to use the Khmer Rouge as a pawn in that, we'll use them. And we don't appreciate that we're being used by the Khmer Rouge rather than the other way around. Thank you.