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Back to the “Killing Fields”
A professor of history has made a personal crusade of pursuing Pol Pot, the Cambodian ruler responsible for the deaths of thousands in the 1970s.
April 1996
by Patrick Dilger
Patrick Dilger covers Yale for the New Haven Register. His most recent piece for this magazine was “Law Students in Action,” in the December issue.
In his office at the Hall of Graduate Studies, Ben Kiernan, an associate professor in the history department, is holding a wrinkled piece of paper under a light. Down one side of the paper, handwritten in graceful Cambodian characters, are the names of eight boys and girls, ages 9 to 14. At the bottom is the signature of Kang Kech Iev, director of an extermination center run by the Cambodian Communists-the Khmer Rouge-near the village of Tuol Sleng in the 1970s. Of the 14,000 people confined there, just seven are known to have survived. None of the children on Kiernan’s list is among them. Next to their names is a scrawled notation dated May 30, 1978. It reads: “Kill them all.”
The list is part of a massive body of evidence that Kiernan has compiled on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 under the notorious Pol Pot. “They were just children,” says the Australian-born Kiernan, whose latest book, The Pol Pot Regime, was recently published by Yale University Press. “Their only crime might have been that their parents disagreed with Pol Pot’s ideology. Or perhaps not even that. They may have been targeted just because of the part of the country they lived in.”
It was not hard to fall afoul of the hard-line Maoist dictum embraced by Pol Pot, a French-educated Cambodian born with the name Saloth Sar. During his efforts to accomplish what he called a “purification of the Khmer race” and create a classless society (Kiernan calls it “an indentured agrarian state”), more than a million-and-a-half of the country’s 8 million people were executed, starved, or worked to death. Cambodia’s economy was shattered, its communications with the outside world severed, its intelligentsia all but wiped out. The first Western reporter allowed into the country after the fall of the Khmer Rouge wrote in March 1979: “The Cambodia that survived Pol Pot is like a dismembered body that is trying to come back to life.” Its empty and dilapidated cities were so quiet, the reporter wrote, “that bird song has a sinister ring to it.”
Redressing those wrongs has become a prime goal for Kiernan, who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of modern Cambodia. And he is pursuing it as head of the Cambodian Genocide Program, which is cosponsored by Yale’s Center for International and Area Studies and the Law School’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Started in January 1995 under a $499,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State, the program developed out of an appeal to Congress by Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia to establish a State Department Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations. The program’s purpose was to assemble as much information as possible about how the Khmer Rouge operated and who gave the orders for the wholesale executions that became the theme of the 1985 film The Killing Fields. It was also to be used to train contemporary Cambodians to pursue legal action against Pol Pot, who still leads a weakened but active rebel force of Khmer Rouge in northwestern Cambodia.
The Congressional supporters of the program felt it needed an academic base for research, and Yale was selected over seven other candidates. The selection was not without dissenters, including some at Yale. According to Gaddis Smith, the Larned Professor of History and former director of Yale’s Center for International and Area Studies, some felt the program was inappropriate because it was not “pure scholarship.” Smith disagreed. “If a university is going to avoid all the real issues in human life,” he says, “we will be reduced to studying ancient history and mathematics. Genocidal behavior has unfortunately recurred repeatedly throughout history, and with the killing technology available in the 20th century it has become even more horrible. The answer is for all of us to learn as much as we can and do as much as we can to prevent them from happening again.”
Craig Etcheson, a scholar of Southeast Asian history who is now manager of Yale’s program in genocide studies, finds it both ironic and fitting that efforts to address the gruesome legacy of Pol Pot’s regime started in the United States. The plight of Cambodia and its people, he points out, has nagged at the American conscience since the Vietnam War, during which the United States dropped more than 540,000 tons of bombs on the country before Congress called a halt in 1973.
“I think there’ve been a lot of recriminations regarding the U.S. involvement there,” says Etcheson, a former member of the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge, a lobbying group. “There are many people on the right who feel that we abandoned our Cambodian allies, and there are a lot on the left who feel it was our involvement that led them to that fate. The conjunction of those two streams of thought paralyzed the U.S. and led to its hands-off treatment of the Khmer Rouge.”
Whatever the reasons, efforts to make Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge accountable for their crimes were achingly slow to evolve. In 1979, the newly formed Cambodian government tried Pol Pot and members of his regime in absentia, but the trial had little impact. During the 1980s, when the ousted Khmer Rouge still held Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations, the opportunity to bring them before the World Court was allowed to pass without action. “The international community designed the Genocide Convention after World War II to prevent any recurrence of crimes against humanity, but it has never been enforced,” says Kiernan. “One result was the death of more than a million Khmers at Pol Pot’s hands and the continuing possibility of that recurring.”
Kiernan does not shrink from comparing Pol Pot and his lieutenants to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in their obsession with racist, totalitarian policies. Thousands of doctors, teachers, businessmen, and others whose education or position posed a perceived threat to Pol Pot’s vision were eliminated. Ethnic Vietnamese, targeted because of their race, were almost wiped out in Cambodia. But Pol Pot’s racism also turned inward against native Khmer people who lived in the eastern part of the country, along the Vietnamese border. They were labeled “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds,” says Kiernan.
Kiernan acknowledges that he is helped by the fact that, like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge compiled meticulous records, many of which survived after Pol Pot and his followers fled the 1979 Vietnamese invasion that toppled the Khmer regime. During its first year, Yale’s genocide-studies program collected hundreds of thousands of these documents, including maps of prisons and grave sites, death lists, biographical profiles of Khmer Rouge leaders, and more than 4,000 photographs of victims and the officials who may have been responsible for their deaths. With the aid of computers, researchers have added a new dimension to what Gaddis Smith calls “real detective scholarship.” By early next year, all the documentation will have been transferred to databases that will be made available on CD-ROM and the Internet in an effort to contact people with information about events in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. Kiernan hopes that distributing the information may elicit help from people who could identify many of Pol Pot’s victims.
Until recently, Cambodia itself didn’t have the human resources to pursue a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, but last August a program overseen by the Schell Center produced its first crop of Cambodian graduates in the fields of international criminal law and international human rights law. They are expected to provide aid to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, which was established in January 1995 to serve as a permanent institute for Khmer Rouge-related research.
In this country, Kiernan’s program has been assisted by some of the more than 150,000 Cambodian refugees who fled here during and after Pol Pot’s rule. One New Haven-area man-who requested anonymity because he feared retaliation by Khmer Rouge supporters in this country-recalled how, as a 12-year-old, he was forced to work 18 hours a day in the forests and rice-fields. “We were malnourished, they gave us hardly any food,” recalled the man, who was deported to the countryside with his family from Phnom Penh. “We would eat leaves, insects, anything we could find.” After more than a year in captivity, he escaped with several others after swimming across the Mekong River to Vietnam. But it was not before he came across the body of his father. “He had been butchered, just like a pig,” the man said. “Sometimes I wonder what has happened to justice-how all this could happen while other countries stood and watched.”
In the best of all worlds, the genocide-studies program would ensure that justice was meted out to Pol Pot and his lieutenants. But there are obstacles to that goal, not the least of which is that the Cambodia inquiry concerns events that happened two decades ago, and that many potential witnesses have died or been killed. Kiernan says a tribunal is “probable, but not certain.” More likely, he says, is a “truth commission” similar to those used in countries like El Salvador and Chile that would gather information and issue indictments. That would make the Khmer Rouge subject to arrest outside Cambodia, restricting their movement and making it more difficult for sympathetic countries like Thailand to shelter them.
Ronald Slye, the Schell Center’s associate director, says that an important part of the healing process for Cambodia is establishing a comprehensive record that will be available to the public, and that progress is being made. “It will allow the country to come to grips with a horrendous past and move forward,” Slye says. “If there is no national dialogue, the prospects for future peace and human rights are that much less.”
The Cambodian Genocide Program was established at a time of growing interest in finding better ways to deal quickly with crimes against humanity. The war crimes tribunals created by the United Nations for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda were the first of their kind since the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of World War II, and there is now growing pressure to set up an international criminal court. A new report on Cambodia compiled for the State Department by two legal scholars recommends laying the groundwork for future prosecutions by establishing a commission of Cambodians and international experts. The report was prepared after the genocide-studies program sponsored an international “Striving for Justice” conference in Phnom Penh last August. During the conference, the leaders of Cambodia’s coalition government (democratically elected in 1993 after a massive U.N. rebuilding effort) declared their intention to pursue legal action against Pol Pot for human rights violations. The gathering also prompted the Khmer Rouge to declare Kiernan an “arch war criminal” and an “accessory executioner of U.S. imperialism.”
Given the constantly shifting allegiances of Cambodian politics, Kiernan is well aware that there may be others who would rather bury the past than resurrect it through war crimes trials. He says it is the Cambodians themselves who will ultimately decide which course to take. “We’re not out to push an agenda,” Kiernan says. “This program is intended to give Cambodians the training and information they need to pursue cases against the Khmer Rouge in any way they choose, not to conduct trials for them.”
In this country, Kiernan himself ran into a flurry of criticism early in the course of the genocide-studies program from a fellow Australian scholar, Stephen Morris. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article last April, Morris, who is currently a researcher at Harvard, wrote to attack the choice of Kiernan as the person to lead the Cambodia investigations. Focusing on some of Kiernan’s early writings as a graduate student, when Kiernan was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Morris branded his countryman as “one of the Khmer Rouge’s most ardent defenders during Pol Pot’s reign of terror.” Morris’s theme was taken up by several others, including Gerard Henderson, the executive director of Australia’s Sydney Institute, who said that Kiernan had “barracked for the Khmer Rouge when the Cambodian killing fields were choked with corpses.” Time correspondent Christopher Ogden followed up with an essay in the magazine’s Asian edition denouncing the State Department for ignoring this “red flag.” The department’s decision to give the contract to Yale and not other strong candidates like David Hawk-a former U.S. director of Amnesty International who had spent much of the 1980s documenting the years of Khmer Rouge rule-reflected its “long, tortured history of treating Pol Pot gingerly,” Ogden wrote.
Kiernan fired back publicly at Morris, questioning his credentials as a Southeast Asian scholar and saying in the Wall Street Journal that Morris had based his claims on “selective quotes” from Kiernan’s early writings, while ignoring his 18 years of research exposing the atrocities of Pol Pot’s regime. “It struck me as a hall of mirrors,” Kiernan says. “On the one hand I was accused of being a Khmer Rouge sympathizer, while on the other the Khmer Rouge were sentencing me as an arch war criminal.”
Kiernan says he has long acknowledged, publicly and in print, “that there were things I got wrong about the Khmer Rouge.” He says that “errors of interpretation” led him to believe initially that the Cambodian Communists might have been a positive force in an essentially feudal country. He adds that his early commentaries appeared at a time when random acts of “post-war revenge” were common, and not always easy to distinguish from what became an orchestrated plan of extermination.
In July, Kiernan was joined in his own defense by more than two dozen leading experts in Cambodian affairs who wrote an open letter to the Journal noting that “since 1978, Mr. Kiernan has devoted his career to documenting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Far from being an apologist for Pol Pot, Prof. Kiernan has been an outspoken and untiring opponent of the Khmer Rouge.” The debate, which one government official labeled an “academic food fight,” began to die out after an October editorial in the conservative newspaper The Washington Times characterized the campaign by Morris and his allies as “the kind of lunacy and quest for ideological purity that ought to be left to the other side.”
Kiernan believes the debate ended well because it focused attention on the program and drew strong support from the academic community. But a Washington Post story, citing congressional aides, said the dispute had clouded the program’s future by irritating some key members of Congress and undercutting enthusiasm for funding beyond the initial allocation. Kiernan says that, with federal budget dollars at a premium in any case, the program will probably look to private and international funding to sustain itself. Nevertheless, it appears to be winning new friends. Frederick Z. Brown, a former State Department official who was in charge of Indochinese affairs when the Khmer Rouge came to power, told the New York Times that he was at first skeptical about the program because it looked like “a make-work project, idealistic but without practical application.
“I have changed my mind,” Brown says. “We have to try to assign some kind of responsibility for what happened. It doesn’t do any good to sweep it under the rug.”  |
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