Shadow over Cambodia
Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge are on the verge of another international victory. The propaganda campaign by the US, the UK and the UN Security Council has by and large been taken up by the media. The UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, they say, has been a "great success". Never mind that the UN neglected to disarm Pol Pot's army, allowed it to expand its forces and zones, overlooked the necessity to destroy its weapons caches, and failed to staunch the flow of Thai money into Pol Pot's coffers or to impose a ceasefire.
The Khmer Rouge killed 131 people in the March-May run up to the UN election, and attacked peacekeepers from Japan, India, China, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, Indonesia, the US, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Colombia, France, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Singapore and Britain, among others. Forget all that. There has been an election! On June 1, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher hailed it as one of the "triumphs of democracy". The Khmer Rouge signalled their acceptance of this triumph by blowing up five bridges and resuming their terror campaign.
We were all moved by the demand for peace and pluralism expressed in the massive turnout of Cambodia's voters last month. But according to Prince Sihanouk, the victorious Funcinpec royalists have been infiltrated by a "large number of Khmer Rouge ... tasked with eliminating true royalists". The royalist army is largely under the control of the Khmer Rouge. Royalist provincial organisations are riddled with Khmer Rouge. After the election, a royalist spokesperson called for unelected Khmer Rouge to be included in the government, saying even the defence ministry was "negotiable". If the Khmer Rouge are "lying low", it is because some royalists are doing their work for them.
Western governments have known these facts all along, but ideological mendacity blinds politicians to the chance that history shall be repeated in Cambodia. In 1975, Pol Pot came to power with a dual strategy of military terror and by infiltrating popular royalists
and assassinating their leaders until his agents rose in rank to control their movement, and eventually the nation.
If disaster in Cambodia is to be avoided, these facts must be made known. Action now could prevent a return to power by the Khmer Rouge either militarily, or through a royalist backdoor. The Washington-based Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR) has for four years been the only international organisation dedicated solely to preventing the Khmer Rouge from imposing its second genocide on the Cambodian people in one generation. Unless CORKR can raise $15,000 by the end of August, it will cease to exist. The US coalition sponsoring this fight against Pol Pot has determined that if the international community does not care enough about Cambodia to raise this pittance, it is not possible to carry on.
Time is short. Your readers can send contributions to CORKR, otherwise, those who speak the unpalatable truth will be silenced, and there will be little warning if, or when, Cambodia falls back into shadow.
Chanthou Boua, author and CORKR executive committee member.
Craig Etcheson, author and executive director, CORKR.
Ben Kiernan, Professor of Southeast Asian History, Yale University.
David Munro, film-maker.
John Pilger, journalist.
Borasmy Ung, CORKR executive committee member.
CORKR, 318 4th Street NE, Washington DC 20002, USA.