Khmer Rouge blind spots
How French and American journalists misunderstood Cambodia's Tragedy
Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, France evacuated its embassy in Phnom Penh, the last bit of Cambodian territory not yet under Khmer Rouge control.
Less than two weeks earlier the guerrillas had walked into the capital unopposed, sweeping away a regime abandoned by both its corrupt leaders and its US backers.
No one could predict that over two million people – 30% of Cambodia's population – would perish in less than four years, as the Khmer Rouge sought to eradicate a 1,000-year civilisation in pursuit of a self-sufficient agrarian utopia. But when the black-clad fighters marched in on 17 April, the omens were not good.
Within hours, Phnom Penh's new masters ordered its complete evacuation. Residents, including the old and infirm, were herded out at gunpoint; those linked to the former government were shot. Thousands managed to find refuge at the French embassy that morning, before the Khmer Rouge sealed off the compound.
A 13-day stand-off ensued. Under pressure from the guerrillas, the French had to surrender most of those who had sought their protection. Dubious passports were frantically issued. Officials bent on quiet negotiation clashed with reporters who wanted to get a dramatic story out.
Most people know of these events through the 1984 film The Killing Fields, based on the experiences of New York Times' Sydney Schanberg and his local assistant Dith Pran. But the most eye-opening account of the unfolding tragedy is found in François Bizot's memoir Le Portail (The Gate), published in 2000.
Bizot was an ethnographer with a deep knowledge of – and love for - Khmer culture. He was also familiar with the Khmer Rouge, who had held him captive for several months four years earlier. Having now sought refuge at the embassy, he found that his experience and language skills made him the ideal intermediary between French officials and the gunmen at the gate.
In the most surreal passages of a chronicle rich in dark humour, Bizot is allowed out to round up compatriots who might still be stranded in the city. After driving through scenes of chaos, braving road blocks where gun-toting teenagers covet everything from his watch to the van, he reaches the university campus.
Finding a French lecturer, Bizot urges him to jump in. The response: "I'm not going anywhere. I've been waiting too long for this blessed day to arrive! I want to share in the joy of liberation, like everyone else... It's party time!"
Such a perspective on Cambodia's plight may sound farcically removed from reality. But it was the view peddled by the newspapers that were most in tune with France's smart opinion.
Libération hailed the Khmer Rouge takeover with headlines such as: "The resistance flag flies over Phnom Penh", "Seven days of celebration for a liberation". Their correspondent emphasised "protection of civilians" as "the main concern for the forces of liberation". Everyone, "from refugees to senior civil servants, had come to wish for the victory of the National United Front of Kampuchea [the umbrella resistance group dominated by the Khmer Rouge]".
During the civil war, Phnom Penh had seen a massive influx from "liberated" areas. The paper did not explain why, if those displaced people yearned for the new order, they had remained in the overcrowded city rather than returning to their Khmer Rouge-run villages.
But for left-wing media, no explanation was needed. With the hated regime of Marshall Lon Nol gone, the future had to be rosy. Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur acclaimed war correspondent Jean Lacouture praised "a resistance movement to a US-manufactured government" that promised a "better Cambodia." Le Monde was looking forward to a "new society… free from all the vices that prevent rapid development: depraved morals, corruption, trafficking of all kinds, smuggling will be eliminated, as will all means of inhumane exploitation." On 17 April France's newspaper of record gushed: "The city is liberated... Popular enthusiasm is evident."
Crowds did cheer the Khmer Rouge as they marched in. The guerrillas had been allied with exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk and had enjoyed international support. People hoped for a national unity government, not a Communist revolution. Those hopes were dashed that very day, when the evacuation of the capital was ordered.
On 18 April, a UN official in Cambodia called the mass displacement "pure and simple genocide". But the left-wing press simply ignored the fear and chaos that had descended on the city. Le Monde told readers: "Citing a threat of aerial bombardment, the Khmer Rouge order civilians to evacuate Phnom Penh," taking the official justification at face value. Even after reaching the safety of Thailand, its correspondent told French TV on May 8 that evacuation was necessary to feed everyone.
The Khmer Rouge project was unprecedented in communist history. Marxist-Leninist doctrine called for the overthrow of capitalism, followed by a transitional socialist state leading to a perfect classless society; Mao tried to speed up the process through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But even that was too slow for the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea: they wanted communism in one fell swoop.
They abolished trade, money and class distinctions, sending intellectuals and professionals to labour camps in pursuit of complete equality under "Brother number one", Pol Pot. Those resisting "re-education" were killed in fields or at the S-21 prison. And if that meant mass deaths from starvation, exhaustion and executions, so be it.
Le Monde began reporting the truth in 1976, with accounts of mass killings by refugees. The next year, Catholic missionary François Ponchaud published Cambodia Year Zero, exposing the totalitarian reality that had engulfed the country. Libération acknowledged it only in 1978, when Jean Lacouture also made his mea culpa.
Why did those observers remain blind for so long? The Khmer Rouge experiment rekindled the utopian embers always smouldering within the French intelligentsia. Pol Pot and some of his lieutenants drew their communist zeal from their student days in 1950s Paris. By the mid-1970s, the USSR had long lost its revolutionary and appeal and Maoism was on the wane. Wars of national liberation, on the other hand, were trending: their fighters, unlike Soviet or Chinese leaders, had no established record, giving admirers complete freedom to imagine their virtues.
Jean-François Revel defined utopia as the condemnation of what exists in the name of what does not. The Cambodian conflict suited such a mind-set. The appeal was simple: Lon Nol's discredited clique, backed by devastating American bombs, versus the secretive Khmer Rouge, judged only by their idealistic promise – as long as accounts of their brutality, both before and after the takeover, could be conveniently dismissed as propaganda.
A comparison with coverage of the Cambodian tragedy in the US – the other Western country involved - is revealing. Here is a representative sample of headlines from American newspapers in the aftermath of the fall of Phnom Penh:
"USSR congratulates Prince Norodom Sihanouk and Khmer Rouge for 'liberation' "(New York Times, 19 April 1975)
"Unconfirmed repts say number of important figures in fallen Cambodian govt" (New York Times, 22 April)
"Armed troops of Communist-led Khmer Rouge visit Thailand" (New York Times, 28 April)
"We beat the Americans" (Newsweek, 5 May)
"A Khmer curtain descends" (Time, 5 May)
"Ford says Reds Slay Lon Nol aides" (International Herald Tribune, 6 May)
"Phnom Penh: Victory of peasants; eyewitness reports" (International Herald Tribune, 10 May)
On 9 May, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg acknowledged that millions were being uprooted as the Khmer Rouge imposed a "peasant revolution that has thrown the entire country into upheaval". But neither this nor the article articles give a sense of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Some attempt to play down fears of Khmer Rouge violence. As the guerrillas closed in on the capital, Schanberg wrote: "I have seen the Khmer Rouge and they are not killing anyone… Wars nourish brutality and sadism and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a communist government."
On 19 May, after Schanberg and his colleagues were evacuated to Thailand, Time Magazine ran a feature based on their testimony under the headline "Long March from Phnom Penh". It concluded: "The foreign evacuees saw a few bodies on the roads and highways last week, but these could have been 'accidental' victims of the forced march to the countryside."
American correspondents matched their French counterparts in their reluctance to see the full horror of Khmer Rouge rule. But neither did they proclaim its advent as a new dawn or seek to justify mass transfers of population. Their blindness was not fed by utopianism.
A clue to understanding American journalistic preconceptions is found in Schanberg's despatch dated 13 April 1973 entitled "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life." As the US was the main cause of misery in Cambodia and Vietnam, he argues, its impending withdrawal from both countries can only improve things: "For the ordinary people of Indochina... it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."
Schanberg remained convinced that the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea was rooted in America's actions. That idea is perhaps most succinctly expressed in The Killing Fields. In one scene, after the genocide becomes public knowledge, his character is asked whether he and others had not underestimated the savagery of the Khmer Rouge. Schanberg snaps back: "Maybe we underestimated the anger $7 billion in bombing would unleash."
Psychologists have identified a tendency in some powerful people to blame themselves when things go wrong. They call it "vulnerable narcissism": a sense of self-importance that can lead to exaggerated feelings of responsibility. A similar trait may also affect national psyches or worldviews.
There is no doubt that US misdeeds contributed to Cambodia's martyrdom. But other forces were also at work: China and the USSR had their own proxies; the North Vietnamese violated Cambodian neutrality before America did; before his downfall in 1970, Norodom Sihanouk dangerously courted both Hanoi and Washington.
However if only the United States possesses true power, all other nations and their actors become mere shadows. For better or for worse, the world bends to America's will alone.
This assumption has long coloured US journalism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Hearst press blamed the Truman administration for the Communist victory in China and the Soviet Union's acquisition of the atom bomb. Vulnerable narcissism remains a key theme in American foreign reporting, and helps explain the media's lack of interest in countries where the US is not involved.
Utopianism is an equally enduring aspect of French culture. In Le Portail, Bizot relates how the communist lecturer was handed to the embassy by the Khmer Rouge, who had no use for him. The man was wearing the fighters' distinctive black pyjama-like outfit and patterned headband. This earned him a slap in the face from an embassy worker, who forced him to change clothes.
Reality eventually hit French fans of the Khmer Rouge in the face. But for some intellectuals, the change was brief. In 1979, as the Democratic Kampuchea collapsed, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault expressed support for Iran's Islamic revolution.