intervention in Cambodia:

A Double-Edged Sword
Sophal Ear
Supi1al Fur is an Assistant Professor o/National Security Affairs at the US
Noval postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He was a TED Fellow in 2009, U
Fulhright Specialist in 2010. and was honored (IS a Young Global Leader in
2011 hy the World Economic Forllm. A graduate 0/ UC Berkeley and Princeton
University. Sophal moved to the United States/rom France as (/ Camhodian
re.filgee at the age 0/10.
Introduction and Background
Cambodia, known as an "Island of Peace" in the 1960s, is like any other
typical post-colonial country-groping its way through development-except
for one inconvenient truth: it suffered one of the worst abuses of humanity in the
20,h Century. thanks to a fanatical Maoist group known as the Khmer Rouge,
when 1.7 million people or a quarter of the population died.
During the \960s, the economy was strong--Cambodia exported more rice
than it imported-- and it was such an example of development that even Lee
Kuan Yew came to Cambodia to learn about nation-building after he led
Singapore as a self-governing state. Paradoxically, it was during this time that a
war raged on next-door in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia by
American B-525 would start. More bombs fell on Cambodia in subsequent years
than all of World War 11 Europe. Little did anyone know what future decades
w\'ldd hold for this "Island of Peace."
Coming from Cambodia, I'd like to frame this in a more personal context
and share a bit about my family. My late mother was born in 1936 and had a
typical Cambodian childhood. She had seven years' schooling but learned
throughout her life, one of which was Vietnamese. It would
prove to be extremely useful and important to her later in her life, the lives of
Illy four surviving siblings, and my own.
I was born in late 1974. Within months, the Khmer Rouge came to power.
Their rule resulted in a complete reordering of society, a literal reboot to "Year
Zero" when money was banned and all one could own was a spoon. Describing
the Khmer Rouge, Michael Paterniti has written:
Once upon a lime- 1975. actually. in Camhodia-there was a regime so
('vil that it created an antisociety where torture was currency and music . .
hooks. and love were abolished. This regime ruled/or /Ollr years and
lIIurdered nearly 2 million oOts citizens. a quarter of the population I
Paterniti could not have formulated a better description.
My parents lived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and when the
Sophal Ear
Khmer Rouge entered (sullen but resolute in their quest to cull from the country
all bourgeoisie), Mom and Dad. along with over two million other residents
were forcibly relocated to the countryside. There, they were made to work in
rice tie Ids like water buffalos and to contribute their labor and energy for the
"greater good" of this anti-society. As a Western academic apologist of the
Khmer Rouge lamented,
What the urban dwellers consider 'hard'lahor may not he punishment or
community service beyond human endurance .. , Such associations [with
memories it invokes of Russian history] take what is happening in
Cambodia out of its historical and cultural contex/
2
What other Solzhenitsyn Gulag-like context could there be? One can only
think of the Cultural Revolution in China. The end-result of this revolution was
that one in four Cambodians died (possibly even three, depending on the actual
population of Cambodia at the time, a number that remains disputed), including
my own father of malnutrition and dysentery and my oldest brother, who has
been missing since 1975.
The death of what is now generally agreed to be 1.7 million people was due
to direct state violence resulting in genocide and crimes against humanity. The
policy to empty cities, which the Khmer Rouge ruthlessly implemented on 17
April 1975, led to famine as a result of botched agrarian policy and massive
deaths from treatable diseases. My wife's own father was picked-up by the
commune chief one day and told that he would be going to a nearby village. In
fact, he was taken away and beaten to death. A boy who spied for the Khmer
Rouge reported this to other commune members, who then sent word to Illy
mother-in-law. My wife's father had been targeted from the get-go, made to
clean human and animal waste because he had been skilled at injecting
prescribed medicine during the ancien regime.
It is estimated that of the 400 to 600 legal professionals in existence before
Democratic Kampuchea, only six to twelve survived.
3
(In Cambodia, they really
did "kill all the lawyers.") Examples of state aggn:ssion, oppression, and
personal and economic rights infringements in Cambodia include, for example,
the banning of private property (except for one's spoon) and the destruction of
families by systematically breaking-up children from parents and teaching them
to respect the "Angka" (the Khmer Rouge organization) above all. Individual
and societal effects of this state aggression include post-traumatic stress and a
local disinclination towards confrontation with the state even decades later, lest
one disappear. Ignorance, or feigning ignorance, meant survival. Questioning
lIulhority (or even wearing spectacles) meant death.
SlIpport for the Khmer Rouge
Despite the death toll, the Western academic quoted earlier was not alone
and not the exception in her support. Another was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer
at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He
was an ardent supporter of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge's top leader, and visited
Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia had been rechristened during the Khmer
Why Peace
Rouge '5 reign. Ironically, he was murdered on Christmas day, 1978, the very
night after he personally interviewed Pol Pot.
In a conference that took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from 17-18
November 1979, following the invasion of Cambodia and ouster ofthe Khmer
Rouge by the Vietnamese government, participants met to discuss how the
Khmer Rouge could return to power and be rid of Vietnam. A speaker at the
conference named George Hildebrand had collaborated with Gareth Porter on
one of the first books on the Khmer Rouge Revolution, entitled Cambodia:
,,,'rarvation and Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press). This 1976 book
presented the Khmer Rouge in a positive light. Replete with propaganda pictures
from the Khmer Rouge, it even justified the forced evacuation of hospital
patients from Phnom Penh. Noam Chomsky cited the Porter and Hildebrand
book favorably, describing it as:
... a carejillly documented study of the destructive American impact on
Camhodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming
it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on
a wide range of sources.
4
(Later, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge
regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation.)
The conference included a Khmer Rouge delegation headed by leng Thirith,
the Minister of Social Affairs for Democratic Kampuchea. Her husband, leng
Sary, was Foreign Minister for Democratic Kampuchea. After three decades of
freedom and wealth, both now await trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal taking
place near Phnom Penh.
Passport to Freedom
Returning to the personal, the only reason that my four siblings and I are
alive today is because my mother spoke Vietnamese, and was able to use that
language as a passport to freedom. At the time, my mother received word that
she would be able to leave Cambodia if she could prove that she was a
Vietnamese national. She decided to pretend being Vietnamese. Her Vietnamese
was so bad that she had originally given all the boys girls' names and all the
girls boys' names. If it were not for a Vietnamese lady whom she had
befriended. who told her of this mistake, we would all have been sent to the
gallows. With this Good Samaritan's assistance, my mother was tutored for dm
days in the repatriation camps at Koh Thom and Koh Tiev before each of her
language interviews. In retrospect, this woman was an intervener. Because ofher
kindness, my mother was able to pass two exams, one by the Khmer Rouge and
one by the Vietnamese cadres, to prove herself as Vietnamese.
But the intervening did not end there. After Vietnam, we planned on
traveling to France, but to get to France was another incredible experience
involving the kindness of others, in particular, a Frenchman named Bernard.
Guyader. A distant cousin, who was a starving Parisian student, had the diftkuk
task of getting us to France, even though he had no means of doing so. He hid 10
find someone to run the paperwork and also locate another person who had the
same last name as my mother, to prove some kind of familial relationship in "
Sophal Ear
order for us to be sponsored to go to France. One day, despondcnt, he bUlllped
into Bernard who in tum cared enough to intervene. He helped my family with
the paperwork and found the needed individual with the same last name as my
mother. Bernard persuaded her to sign the paperwork and mail it, but they got
lost in the mail. He simply forged the signature the second time around. (When
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already locked its gate at the close of
business, Bernard simply hopped over it to gain access to the counter,
whereupon he declared that by his watch it wasn't yet closing time.)
Human Rights and Intervention for Peace
But how does this personal history and experience particularly relate to the
human condition, human rights, and intervention for peace? Forming the base of
my experience is the idea that without human rights defenders, or interveners, I
and countless millions would not be here today .
For those who have not shared similar experiences to my own, I have
another angle to relate to: natural rights. Natural rights are essentially rights that
you are born with, that are "natural" to you, and not necessarily given by a
government. These rights are, for example, captured in the ideas of "life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness" and "all men are created equal,"S enshrined in
America's Declaration of Independence.
Tip O'Neill's adage that "All politics is local" is also useful. If we look back
to the 1950s and I 960s and the great Civil Rights Movement that sprouted then.
we can see that it was certainly a period that highlighted the injustices of J im
Crow laws that kept races "separate but equal." Equality under the law cannot he
separated.
Human rights can seem like something foreign, but in fact, human rights as
explained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sound strikingly
familiar: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.,,6
Natural rights are civil rights which in tum are human rights. As citizens of the
world, the global becomes the local and vice-versa. Events that happen
Ihousands of miles away from us still have an impact on us. As much as we may
think "out of sight, out of mind," we now live in a global village, and what
happens in Darfur does not stay in Darfur. It happens to all of us. And, when
individuals are aggressed against there, it is equally unjust and harmful.
George McGovern, who was the Democratic Party's candidate for the 1972
presidential election, had opposed the Vietnam War. He had a firm anti-war
Slance. However, he strongly advocated humanitarian intervention in Cambodia
whe:n he realized what the Communists had wrought to the country. He firmly
believed that "the rise of the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs
of U.S. involvement in Indochina."7 As sovereign rulers, the murderous Khmer
Rouge regime killed Cambodians under the lawful backing of the international
system, which turned a blind eye to abuses happening inside Cambodia. What is
now happening in North Korea is no different.
Why Peace
Conclusion
Cambodia's story is a cautionary tale of antagonists and protagonists when it
coilles to intervention. While some academics have checkered pasts with respect
to Cambodia, encouraging intervention by the Khmer Rouge to reorder society
into an agrarian utopia, they have long been forgotten. Some, like Ben Kieflll!!l,
have apologized and have gone on to become celebrated leaders in genocide
studie:>. Other paid with their lives. The Good Samaritan story that is really my
life story shows that were it not for strangers along the way, and their personal
interventions, it would be impossible for me to write these words today.
Acknowledgements: .lim Chhor and Richard Chhuon provided excellent
research assistance. The views expressed are Sophal Ear's alone, and do not
reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.
I Michael Paterniti. "Never Forget", GQ, July 2009. Available:
http://www.gq.com/news-po I iticslbig -i ssues/200907 / cam bod ia-khmer-rouge-
m ichael-paterniti
-: Laura Summers, "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia," Current
History, December 1976 p. 216.
3 Neilson, Kathryn E. "They Killed All the Lawyers: Rebuilding the Judicial
System in Cambodia." CAPI Occasional Paper #13. Victoria: Centre for Asia-
Pacific Initiatives, 1996.
4 Chomsky did this with Edward Herman repeatedly. First in an article in The
Nation entitled "Distortion at Fourth Hand" on 25 June 1977 and then in 1979 in
their book After the Cataclysm: PosMar Indochina & the Reconstruction of
//II[!erialldeology (South End Press) on page 161.
) Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Available:
http://www .archives.gov/exh ibits/charters/declaration _ transcript.html
(> Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available:
http: //www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,
Harper Perennial Edition, 2007, p. 133.
If War is the
Health of the State,
What is Peace?
Karen Kwiatkowski
Karen Kwiatkowski retiredfrom the USAF in 2003 as a Lieutenant Colonel.
She has an MA in Government Fom Harvard University, an MS in Science
I\lanagementfrom the University of Alaska, and has completed both Air
Command and Staff College and the Naval War College seminar programs. She
wned her Ph.D. in World PoliticsFom the Catholic University of America in
1005, with a dissertation on Overt/Covert War in Angola: A Case Study of the
Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine. While in the USAF, Karen has authored
III'Q books on African security issues. African Crisis Response Initiative: Past
Present and Future and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and
Solulions. Her final military assignment was as a political-military affairs
1fficer in the Office of the Secretary' of Defense, Under Secretaryfor Policy, in
,lie Near East South Asia (NESA) Policy directorate. Karen/eft the military to
""ile and publicly speak out against government excess lIndFaud in national
security politics, and has contributed to several books, including Ron Paul: A
Ufe of Ideas, Why Liberty: Personal Journeys Toward Peace and Freedom and
Neo-Conned, Again.
When I contributed to the recently published Why Liherty, the assignment
~ 8 S easy. After all, liberty is a condition that men and women everywhere
mtinctively love and need, even if it isn't always well-articulated. Liberty
speaks to a way of self-government that is human-centered and fundamentally
humane. Liberty defines human rights in a way that is supremely just, and
liberty, by its very nature, is antithetical to force. Liberty is the natural condition
orman, and most individuals share this ideal. Peace, on the other hand, for
Americans born in the past 70 years, and for the millions offoreign subjects of
!he modem American empire, has not been part of their ideals, their ethics or
their collective experience.
When we think of the Renaissance philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
his work on individualism, libertarians and logicians alike chuckle at his claim
I h a ~ "Men must be forced to be free." Rousseau likely meant that we tend to be
\oluntarily enslaved by our governments and kings, and by our cultures and
ndilions. He was right on one aspect of human nature. We are often reluctant to
&i\'C up our fantasies of the justness of our rulers and the righteousness of our
ll'iditions.
Americans, in particular, embrace the language of liberty, even as the
American state itself has become ominously and voraciously antithetical to
liberty. The state pursues its wars in the name of liberty, and the government