Journeys to War and Peace: A Congressional Memoir

5. Indochina: Bringing Peace to Cambodia, Protecting Vietnamese “Boat People”

· 5 · indochina Bringing Peace to Cambodia, Protecting Vietnamese “Boat People” • In the 1980 congressional election, Lester Wolff,who had chaired the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, was defeated, putting me in position under the seniority system to claim his spot. I decided to take it, even though this meant relinquishing the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Africa. The decision wasn’t easy, since I had gotten deeply involved in African issues. But I reluctantly concluded that both strategically and geopolitically ,the issues we confronted in Asia were far more important to the United States. Chairing the Asia Subcommittee offered the opportunity to influence our policy on a number of them: what to do about Cambodia , which Vietnam had invaded in 1978; the struggles for human rights and democracy in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan; continuing economic and military problems in our relationship with Japan; problems and possibilities generated by the normalization of our relationship with China; an incipient nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan; and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. These were among the most significant foreign policy challenges facing our country. From a strategic perspective, Cambodia was not the most important of these issues, but it was the one on which I spent the most time and arguably had the greatest impact. While the Vietnam War raged, Hanoi and Saigon had consumed America’s attention. Not much concern was directed toward Cambodia, whose place in the region was aptly expressed by the title of the journalist William Shawcross’s book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Eager to put the war in Indochina behind them, the American people had taken insufficient notice of the 1975–79 effort by the maniacal Cambodian Communists, known as the Khmer Rouge, to take the country back to“year zero” by destroying Cambodia ’s culture and traditions and executing all its non-Communist intellectuals . By the time they were driven from power by Vietnam in January indochina 99 1979,perhaps as many as two million Cambodians,about 20 percent of the population, had been murdered or had died of sickness and starvation due to the autarchic policies imposed by the Khmer Rouge regime.After their victory, the Vietnamese installed some former Khmer Rouge cadres who had defected from the movement as the leaders of a puppet government in Phnom Penh, known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (prk). IwenttoSoutheastAsiaforthefirsttimeinAugust1975,severalmonths after the establishment of Khmer Rouge rule over all of Cambodia. I arranged to visit Aranyaprathet, a border town in eastern Thailand, where a few thousand Cambodian refugees who had managed to escape were being kept by the Thai government. Charlie Twining, an American Foreign Service officer in Bangkok, accompanied me. Charlie had originally been scheduled to go to Cambodia as a political officer. He had undergone ten months of Khmer language training, but a couple of months before he completed his course, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge and all foreigners were compelled to leave the country. He was reassigned to the us embassy in Bangkok as our Cambodia watcher, monitoring the Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts and interviewing refugees. But not much could be learned about the fate of the Cambodian people, who had become the victims of an Asian Auschwitz, in a country completely cut off from the outside world. In Aranyaprathet, Charlie and I heard incredible stories: for instance, the Khmer Rouge were killing anyone they could find who wore eyeglasses, because that indicated they knew how to read. One of the Khmer Rouge’s diabolical objectives was to eliminate all influence of the previous regime and all traces of the country’s centuries-old civilization. For the first time, I began to appreciate the enormity of the evil that had descended on Cambodia . It generated a very strong feeling in me that somehow, some way, something had to be done. My view of what that response should be was deeply influenced by my reactions both to the us failure to do more to rescue European Jewry from the growing Nazi threat in the 1930s and to the counterproductive consequences of our military involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. The first demonstrated the consequences of indifference; the second, the limits of intervention. Together they underscored the imperative to prevent moral horrors within the framework of what was realistically possible. As the 100 journeys to war & peace world awakened to what had befallen Cambodia...