“As we leave the Senate tonight, the Khmer Rouge will be awakening for another bloody day’s business,” he said. “The noose of genocide will tighten with a jerk around the necks of another 1,577 Cambodian peasants.”96 Even those countries that had ratified the convention deferred to diplomatic niceties among states; other countries resisted and refused to challenge a fellow member of the club of nations in court. Cambodia, which itself had ratified the genocide treaty in 1951, never had to answer to genocide charges.
Apart from bilaterally denouncing the KR for its terror or attempting to get an ally to file a genocide case in the World Court, the United States might have condemned the crime in the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, or one of the multiple committees at the UN that had sprung up since Lemkin’s day. Neither the United States nor its European allies did this. Israel became the first country to raise the issue of Cambodia at the United Nations. Representative Chaim Herzog, knowing that much of the violence was Khmer on Khmer, warned of “auto-genocide.”97 And finally, in March 1978, Britain’s UN representative responded to popular pressure from the main churches of England by raising the subject before the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). He called for the appointment of a special human rights rapporteur to investigate.98 The Khmer Rouge dismissed the Human Rights Commission as an imperialist, partisan body of which it would make “mincemeat.”99 And true to form, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria teamed up to block even this rhetorical route, delaying consideration of Cambodia’s human rights record for another full year. By three years into the genocide, no official UN body had condemned the slaughter.
Economist Albert Hirschman observed that those who do not want to act cite the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures. The United States and its allies defended their reticence on the grounds that speaking out or applying soft sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile. Normal diplomatic demarches, symbolic acts, and criticisms were unlikely to affect radical revolutionaries who were committing atrocity on this scale. In testimony on Capitol Hill, foreign service officer Twining noted, “I am not sure that the Cambodian leadership would care a hoot about what we…say.”100 Because the United States gave the KR regime no support, it could not suspend trade or military aid.
Bilateral denunciations by the United States may well have had little effect on the Khmer Rouge’s internal practices. Unfortunately, because so few U.S. officials spoke out publicly against the genocide, we cannot know. But contrary to American claims, the Khmer Rouge were not completely oblivious to outside commentary. Isolated though they were, KR leaders still piped up to refute allegations made by foreign powers. When the British raised the issue of Cambodian human rights violations at the UN Commission in Geneva, the KR responded by claiming that British citizens enjoyed only the right to be slaves, thieves, prostitutes, or unemployed. In April 1978 the KR’s Ieng Sary submitted a letter to the UN, denouncing the “propaganda machine of the imperialists, the expansionists, annexationists” who charged them with mass killing. He made a logical argument about why the KR could never kill on the scale suggested:“There is no reason for the [KR] to reduce the population or to maintain it at its current level,” he wrote, “since today’s population of 8 million is well below the potential of the country, which needs more than 20 million.”101
U.S. policymakers also cited the possibly perverse results of taking a more outspoken approach. Public rebukes would likely anger the Khmer Rouge, causing them to intensify their violence against innocents or withdraw even further into darkness. Diplomats fell into the trap of believing (because they hoped) that the KR were on the verge of emerging from their isolation.102 It is of course possible that outside expressions of interest in the KR’s treatment of its citizens would have made the regime more barbarous and xenophobic, but it is hard to imagine how much worse the regime could have become. Often choosing a policy of isolation can deprive a concerned state of its only means of influencing a violent regime. But in this case the United States had nothing to risk losing by speaking the truth. A far steadier stream of condemnations could conceivably have convinced those educated KR officials who maintained covert radio links to the outside world to press for a more humane policy or even to revolt against Pol Pot and his clan.
The United States might also have pressured China, the KR’s main backer, to use its considerable leverage to deter the KR from its murderousness. But the Carter administration was determined not to jeopardize its burgeoning relationships with either of the KR’s regional allies: Thailand and China. Thailand was anti-Communist, but it maintained civil relations with the Khmer Rouge because its top priority was containing Vietnam. And China, which viewed the Khmer Rouge as a natural and ideological ally, had occupied center-stage in U.S. foreign policy circles since Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing. The Chinese had long been supplying the KR with military advisers, light arms, and ammunition. In early 1978 Chinese military aid to the Khmer Rouge reportedly increased to include 100 light tanks, 200 antitank missiles, a number of long-range 122- and 130-millimeter guns, and more than a dozen fighter aircraft. Despite the gruesome reports of KR terror, the United States did not protest the transaction.103 In May 1977 President Carter called the U.S.-Chinese relationship “a central element of our global policy” and China a “key for global peace.”104 Although China was the state most likely able to affect KR behavior, the Carter administration was not about to risk normalization by carping about the KR’s human rights abuses.
Analogy and Advocacy
U.S. policy toward Cambodia was not contested within the executive branch. Nothing could be done, State Department and White House officials assumed, and virtually nothing was done. It took a handful of members of Congress to begin demanding that the United States take a more expansive view of the land of the possible. Stephen Solarz was a Democratic House member from New York who had won election in 1974 on an antiwar platform and had earlier helped block further U.S. funding to the Lon Nol regime. Unlike most of his colleagues, Solarz had not lost interest in the region with the cutoff of U.S. funds. In August 1975 he had traveled with a House delegation to Thailand, where he had taken a helicopter ride with the embassy’s Twining to Aranyaprathet. There, the man who would become known as the “Marco Polo” of Congress for all his foreign travel, heard tales that reminded him of the forced deportation of Jews in World War II. As a Jew and as a politician—his district contained more Holocaust survivors than any other in the country—he became incensed. “They were killing anyone who wore glasses,” Solarz remembers, “because if they wore glasses, it suggested they knew how to read, and if they knew how to read, it suggested they had been infected with the bourgeois virus. It was a Great Leap Forward that made the Great Leap Forward under Mao look like a tentative half-step.”
In 1976, despite reports of nearly a million dead, no congressional hearings had been held specifically on human rights abuses in Cambodia. Solarz and a few other avid legislators had settled for including the grim press articles in the Congressional Record and occasionally condemning the KR in floor debates. Senator Claiborne Pell, who partnered with Proxmire in pushing the genocide convention and who would later do more than any other senator to try to punish Saddam Hussein for gassing Iraqi Kurds, took a parallel interest in Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1976, he declared:
[If estimates of 1 million killed are] true, approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population has been annihilated—a record of barbarous butchery which is surpassed in recent history only by the Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II…I am amazed that so little has been done to investigate and condemn what is happening in Cambodia. The UN Human Rights Commission has so far ignored the situation in that country.105
By 1977, Solarz, Pell, and others had finally generated enough interest to stage hearings on Capitol Hill devoted exclusively to Cambodian atrocities.