Read Online Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Joel Brinkley
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Cambodia, were hard to get to—and at war. Reporters, diplomats, and aid workers did not travel there. No one was able to total the destruction; no one counted the dead. The only accounts of the horror came from peasants who fled the bombing and the Khmer Rouge. They ran to Phnom Penh, whose population more than tripled to 3 million people. Most of the survivors were illiterate, and even if they were inclined to talk, they had no one to tell.
The Lon Nol government supported a large expansion of the target area for American bombers more or less in exchange for cash. The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh wasn’t interested in the victims. And among the other Westerners in town, undoubtedly some of them agreed with Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” he said in 1974. “Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.” Today those parts of eastern Cambodia are pockmarked with bomb craters, most of them now fetid ponds—hideous scars of a terrible crime.
Lon Nol suffered a stroke in early 1971 and never fully recovered, though he did retake nominal command a short time later, awarding
himself the title of field marshal. He famously declared that Cambodians had no need for “the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy”—joining a parade of Cambodian leaders, before and after, who offered that view. But he seldom left his villa and succumbed to his weakness for spiritual solutions to real-world problems. Once, he had military aircraft sprinkle “magical” sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeter to ward off enemies.
None of it worked. As the Khmer Rouge noose tightened around Phnom Penh, the United States began airlifting food, medicine, and military equipment into the city. Cambodians looted the supplies to the end. Finally, in early April 1975, as Khmer Rouge troops advanced on the city, the airlifts stopped, the United States evacuated its embassy, and the leadership of Lon Nol’s government fled.
No one knew exactly what to expect from the Khmer Rouge. Its leadership remained a mystery; the movement had never explained its intentions. Quinn’s prescient airgram had no impact, and in the meantime Sihanouk sent several U.S. senators a letter in which he predicted that the Khmer Rouge, his allies, planned to set up “a Swedish type of kingdom.”
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh. Over the next few frantic days, journalists covered what they saw before they were forced to leave. They watched, astounded, as Khmer Rouge soldiers, young peasants from the provinces, mostly uneducated teenage boys who had never been in a city before, swept through town. For them, Phnom Penh offered many mysteries. The boys didn’t know what to make of telephones, or toilets. But they set to their job right away, evacuating Phnom Penh, forcing all of its residents, at gunpoint, to leave behind everything they owned and march toward the countryside. Hospital patients still in their white gowns stumbled along carrying their IV bottles. Screaming children ran in desperate search for their parents.
Yet while the mass evacuation of 3 million people was stupefying, the foreign correspondents saw little bloodshed before they were deported. And that is about all the world knew of the new Khmer
Rouge government. Some writers and analysts saw this as the beginning of a horror show. Others believed they were witnessing the early days of a new, utopian society.
C harles Twining, a thirty-three-year-old State Department officer, couldn’t have been more excited about his new assignment: political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. In 1974 he had left a foreign-service posting in Africa to spend a year at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, learning to speak Khmer. He was supposed to take up his new post in June 1975. But then, of course, in April the United States lost its embassy in Phnom
The Lon Nol government supported a large expansion of the target area for American bombers more or less in exchange for cash. The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh wasn’t interested in the victims. And among the other Westerners in town, undoubtedly some of them agreed with Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” he said in 1974. “Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.” Today those parts of eastern Cambodia are pockmarked with bomb craters, most of them now fetid ponds—hideous scars of a terrible crime.
Lon Nol suffered a stroke in early 1971 and never fully recovered, though he did retake nominal command a short time later, awarding
himself the title of field marshal. He famously declared that Cambodians had no need for “the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy”—joining a parade of Cambodian leaders, before and after, who offered that view. But he seldom left his villa and succumbed to his weakness for spiritual solutions to real-world problems. Once, he had military aircraft sprinkle “magical” sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeter to ward off enemies.
None of it worked. As the Khmer Rouge noose tightened around Phnom Penh, the United States began airlifting food, medicine, and military equipment into the city. Cambodians looted the supplies to the end. Finally, in early April 1975, as Khmer Rouge troops advanced on the city, the airlifts stopped, the United States evacuated its embassy, and the leadership of Lon Nol’s government fled.
No one knew exactly what to expect from the Khmer Rouge. Its leadership remained a mystery; the movement had never explained its intentions. Quinn’s prescient airgram had no impact, and in the meantime Sihanouk sent several U.S. senators a letter in which he predicted that the Khmer Rouge, his allies, planned to set up “a Swedish type of kingdom.”
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh. Over the next few frantic days, journalists covered what they saw before they were forced to leave. They watched, astounded, as Khmer Rouge soldiers, young peasants from the provinces, mostly uneducated teenage boys who had never been in a city before, swept through town. For them, Phnom Penh offered many mysteries. The boys didn’t know what to make of telephones, or toilets. But they set to their job right away, evacuating Phnom Penh, forcing all of its residents, at gunpoint, to leave behind everything they owned and march toward the countryside. Hospital patients still in their white gowns stumbled along carrying their IV bottles. Screaming children ran in desperate search for their parents.
Yet while the mass evacuation of 3 million people was stupefying, the foreign correspondents saw little bloodshed before they were deported. And that is about all the world knew of the new Khmer
Rouge government. Some writers and analysts saw this as the beginning of a horror show. Others believed they were witnessing the early days of a new, utopian society.
C harles Twining, a thirty-three-year-old State Department officer, couldn’t have been more excited about his new assignment: political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. In 1974 he had left a foreign-service posting in Africa to spend a year at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, learning to speak Khmer. He was supposed to take up his new post in June 1975. But then, of course, in April the United States lost its embassy in Phnom
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