Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

Others chimed in, also adopting the analogy. The Economist described “brutality that would make Hitler cringe.” 112In an April 1978 New York Times editorial, “Silence is Guilt,” William Safire also referred to the Holocaust miniseries and asked why the world was doing nothing. “In terms of numbers of people killed,”Safire wrote, “this generation’s rival to Adolf Hitler is the leader of Communist Cambodia, Pol Pot.” 113Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 1978, that “the ruthlessness in each country has come about in service to an ideal—of racial purity in Nazi Germany, of political purity in Democratic Kampuchea.” A May 1978 front-page New York Times story said that refugees in Thailand “recall concentration camp survivors in Europe of 1945.”

As the months passed, Capitol Hill became more engaged. Senator Bob Dole (R.–Kans.) was moved by the story of a Cambodian refugee who had visited him. He compared the Cambodian crisis to “the death camps in Nazi Germany, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia.” 114Pleading as always for the ratification of the genocide convention and denouncing the KR, Proxmire noted the parallels with the destruction of the Jews:“This is no ordinary genocide. There are no concentration camps and gas chambers disguised as showers. This is genocide without technology.” 115

Donald Fraser (D.–Minn.), the Hill’s most vocal human rights advocate, chaired a House International Relations Subcommittee hearing in July 1977. Ken Quinn, who in 1977 was tapped as special assistant to the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, told his boss, “This is a chance to go public with all we know.” Holbrooke and Twining appeared on Capitol Hill and ended the State Department’s two-year policy of silence. Holbrooke noted that “journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975.” U.S. intelligence indicated that “for every person executed several have died of disease, malnutrition, or other factors, which would have been avoidable if the Government itself had not followed…a policy which seeks to completely transform the society by the most Draconian measures possible.” 116Holbrooke concluded that “we should speak out,” even though, as he admitted, he was unsure “what the impact of our words” would be. 117This was the first time Twining had been publicly summoned to relay his graphic findings. The U.S. government had detailed knowledge of Pol Pot’s atrocities. A February 13, 1978, State Department cable reported plainly, “A renewed emphasis was placed on completely eliminating all vestiges of the former government and completing the executions of all people who were not from the poor farmer-working class.” 118Still, twining recalls his attitude at the time of the hearing. “It was easy to come before Congress because I was so sure about what was going on,” he says. “When it came to ‘what to do,’ though, I just had this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

With American editorial writers weighing in on the subject with some frequency in 1978, and with congressional pressure mounting, the daily press coverage of human rights abuses finally expanded. In the summer of 1978, the Washington Post and New York Times began running two to three news stories a month on human rights in Cambodia, still a small number but far more than the two or three per year they had run in 1975, 1976, and 1977. By late 1978 death estimates that had earlier been referred to as “reports of mass death” became “hundreds of thousands, possibly 2 1/2 million” and “one to three million killed.” 119

Not until 1978 did nongovernmental actors urge that trying and failing to influence the KR would be preferable to making no effort at all. “One may not be able to triumph over evil, but one need not remain silent in its presence,” syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone wrote in the Washington Post in May 1978. “President Carter might speak up more than once on the subject. He might instruct Andrew Young to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly whenever the representative of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ rises to speak. At every time and in every available forum, those who speak for the United States could call on the conscience of the world to condemn those who commit such atrocities.” 120None of these steps were taken.

President Carter’s first firm public denunciation came in April 1978 when he sent a message to an independent commission examining the atrocity reports in Oslo:

America cannot avoid the responsibility to speak out in condemnation of the Cambodian government, the worst violator of human rights in the world today. Thousands of refugees have accused their government of inflicting death on hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people through the genocidal policies it has implemented over the past three years…It is an obligation of every member of the international community to protest the policies of this or any nation which cruelly and systematically violates the right of its people to enjoy life and basic human dignities. 121

Sixteen months had passed since his inauguration and three years since the fall of Phnom Penh.

In early June 1978, a group calling itself United People for Human Rights in Cambodia fasted and protested in front of the White House, and Freedom House convened a colloquium in Washington, “Cambodia: What Can America Do?” Amnesty International appealed more adamantly for scrutiny of Cambodia’s record. Its 1977–1978 report removed many of its earlier disclaimers. The report cited Ponchaud’s claim that 100,000 was the absolute minimum number of Cambodians executed and said it was possible that “two or three times as many” had been murdered. 122Rather than simply writing privately to the KR, Amnesty called upon the regime to allow independent investigators to deploy to Cambodia and made its own submission to the UN Human Rights Commission. 123Citing refugee and press accounts, the submission stated that although many allegations remained “uncorroborated,” their number and consistency “give cause for great concern.” 124Public and political groups were finally taking notice of a people in dire need.

Although elite opinion had concluded “something had to be done,” the “something” remained narrowly defined. Behind the scenes, U.S. ambassador Andrew Young urged United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to visit Cambodia, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance instructed U.S. embassies to discuss with host countries the possibility of raising the issue of Cambodia in the UN General Assembly. Warren Christopher, Carter’s deputy secretary of state, criticized the KR for its massive human rights abuses but pledged only to support “international efforts to call attention to this egregious situation.” 125The U.S. foreign policy establishment remained persistently passive, issuing only a handful of public statements and never investing its political capital in a serious attempt to alter KR behavior.

Military What? George Who?

As press coverage steadily picked up and as the U.S. legislature responded with hearings, one lonely American official argued that an outside military force should intervene in Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge. That person was a Democratic senator from South Dakota named George McGovern—the same George McGovern who had captured the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1972 presidential election and run on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War. McGovern had spearheaded congressional efforts to proscribe funding for U.S. military operations in Indochina, and he had initiated the passage of the War Powers Act. He said he carried Vietnam “in my stomach and heart and mind for ten years above any other concern in public life.” 126His antiwar credentials were unimpeachable.