[1] The date was 1 March 1991. I have cited this from H. Bruce Franklin, “POW/MIA: ‘The Last Chapter’?”, reproduced in Indochina Newsletter Double Issue 87 & 88, Nos. 4 & 5, 1994, p. 1. Obviously I wrote this years ago. The actions of the first George Bush now seem like playful skirmishing compared to the aggressions of Bush junior. In what follows I continue to write ‘Vietnam’ when the term is used as an adjective, as in ‘Vietnam syndrome’, or in quotations, although otherwise writing ‘Viet Nam’, the official name for the country. Note that ‘Viet Nam’ and ‘Thailand’ are anachronistic when used for times before the 20^th century, and are here strictly conventional as areal designations for non-specialist readers. ‘Cambodia’ is not so anachronistic, for in its native form, kambuja/Kampuchea, it was in use at least since the 9^th century.

[2] Now we see the same spineless behavior of the mainstream press with respect to Iraq. See: Moyer’s documentary at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

[3] For some examples see my Cambodia: A Political Survey (Phnom Penh, Funan Press, 2007), and below. The Cambodian People’s Party, which governed before the 1993 election, took second place in that election although remaining the real holder of power, which was consolidated by its victory in the 1998 election.

[4] The old warmongers included Henry Kissinger and George Shultz who in the mid-1990s were calling “for a bipartisan commission to review Cuba policy”, Julia E. Sweig, in The Nation, New York, May 1, 2007.

[5] For more on the International Republican Institute see Cambodia: A Political Survey, and below.

[6] See “Landmines in Cambodia: The Coward’s War”, issued by Human Rights Watch (Asia Division) and Physicians for Human Rights, September 1991.

[7] These journalistic writings thus amplify and continue the purpose of my books, Cambodia 1975-1982 (first published by South End Press, Boston, 1984, second edition, Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, 1999), Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society, London, Frances Pinter (Publishers), 1986, and Cambodia: a Political Survey, Phnom Penh, Funan Press, 2007.

[8] Below are treatments of some of those writers, of whom the most egregious jacket-switchers are William Shawcross (see below, “Tragedy in Cambodia”), Ed Friedman (writings cited below in “Violence in Democratic Kampuchea: Some Problems of Explanation”), and Stephen Heder (“Shawcross book Highlights post-UNTAC blues”, a review of William Shawcross, Cambodia’s New Deal, in Phnom Penh Post (hereafter PPP) 4/4, 24 Feb-9 March 1995, p. 19. David Ashley, “The end justifies the means?”, PPP 4/11, 2-15 June, 1995, p. 6, is an example of the second type.

[9] ‘Feudal’ is in inverted commas because the term is inaccurate for Southeast Asia. I shall comment on this below. Later Marx’s views changed. As Sunti Kumar Ghosh, “Marx on India”, Monthly Review Jan 1984, pp. 40, ff., wrote, in the 1840s-50s Marx and Engels hoped free trade and the world market would ensure capitalism everywhere; but as facts on colonialism accumulated, their “enthusiasm for capitalism as a transforming instrument cooled” (see H.B. Davis, Towards a Marxist Theory of Nationalism, New York, 1978). Their early view is in articles on India in 1852, in the New York Daily Tribune, where they said, British rule is an “unconscious tool of history”, and would rid India of the muck of ages, shatter oriental despotism, and lay “material foundations of Western society in Asia”. They believed the ruin and devastation of colonial rule was a necessary price for “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia”; In the third volume of Capital there is no more talk of the Asiatic Mode of Production, but of “pre-capitalistic, national modes of production” (333); and Marx’s view of the benefits of colonialism changed. See also, Theodore Shanin, “Late Marx and the Russian ‘Periphery of Capitalism’“, Monthly Review, June 1983, pp. 10-24.

[10] It should not be forgotten that Burma was in advance of the rest of Southeast Asia, including independent Thailand, in the development of formal democratic and parliamentary procedures,  and was more advanced in modern education, with a school system that still produces more competent English speakers than that of Thailand, where, a few years ago it was announced that Thailand would import Information Technology people from Burma (Bangkok Post, ‘Database’, 30 July 2003, “Thailand to tap Burma for IT skills”).

[11] Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, pp. 105-6, quoting D. Dakin, The Greek Struggle for Independence 1821-1833, “Those who spoke the Greek language...had no notion of classical Greece...The classical ruins were quite unintelligible to early modern Greeks [who]...called themselves Romans”.

[12] See Charles Meyer, “Les mystérieuses relations entre les rois du Cambodge et les ‘Po’tâo’ des Jarai”, Études cambodgiennes, No. 4, Octobre-Décembre 1965, pp. 14-26. I have not found records of similar Jarai-Viet Nam contact.

[13] By ‘traditional histories’ I mean chronicles written before European contact, not modern history compilations dealing with ancient times.

[14] For the elements of this argument, which has not yet been fully published, see Michael Vickery, “The 2/k.125 Fragment, a Lost Chronicle of Ayutthaya”, Journal of the Siam Society LXV, 1 (January 1977), 1-80; Chris Baker, “Ayutthaya Rising: From the Land or From the Sea”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34/1 (2003), pp. 41-62; Yoneo Ishii, “A reinterpretation of Thai history with special reference to the pre-modern period”. Paper presented at the 8^th International Conference on Thai Studies at Nakhon Phanom, January 2002.

[15] See Michael Vickery, “Cambodia After Angkor, The Chronicular Evidence for the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries”, Ph.D. Thesis, Yale, 1977, pp. 200-217; Mak Phoeun, Histoire du Cambodge de la fin du XVIe siècle au début du XVIIIe, where it is clear that the first Vietnamese military intervention in Cambodia was in 1658, and the first occupation of territory in the 1690s; Vickery, review of Mak Phoeun, in Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFO)Tome 83 (1996), pp. 405-15; and Vickery, “ ‘1620’ A Cautionary Tale”, forthcoming in Felicitation volume for John Whitmore. The chronicle fragment which I am citing places the event in 1613, perhaps not quite accurate. At least the event was in that decade.

[16] As in Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, p. 229, “the unfortunate choice made by ... King Chan (r. 1806-34) to resist Siam by seeking the countervailing patronage of Vietnam”. This is also a defect in David P. Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest”, in David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside, eds., Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought, Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1982. See also comment in Evans and Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War (first edition), London, Verso, 1984; (second edition), London, Verso, 1990, pp. 2-7, with the especially trenchant reference, p. 2, to Elizabeth Becker, who had lifted her remarks from David Chandler,  A History of Cambodia, p. 127. All references to this work, unless otherwise noted, are to the third edition, Boulder, Westview Press, 2000. All citations from Evans and Rowley, unless explicitly referred to the first, are to their second edition.

[17] These were persons of the generation of Sihanouk’s grandparents, whom the American Thai linguist, William J. Gedney, met on a trip to Cambodia at that time (personal information from Gedney). Before becoming king, Ang Duang spent many years in Bangkok for education and as protégé of King Mongkut. For a general history of this period see Chandler, A History; and Philippe Devillers, [sections on Indochina], in L’Asie du sud-est II, L’Histoire du XXe Siècle, Paris, Éditions Sirey, 1971.

[18] See Evans and Rowley, pp. 35-57. The acronyms are for ‘People’s Republic of Kampuchea’ (1979-1989), and ‘State of Cambodia’ (1989-1993). The latest (since April 2006) accusation by this opposition is that Hun Sen and the CPP are illegitimately giving up territory to Viet Nam through border demarcation treaties. For detail see Vickery, Cambodia A Political Survey, Phnom Penh, 2007, pp. 183-192. Because of the anti-Viet Nam stance this faction has enjoyed much western support.

[19] General Charan, Bangkok Post, 25 June 1992, p. 5. See also Evans and Rowley, pp. 6-7.

[20] Chandler, A History (first edition), Boulder , Westview Press, 1983, p.127, “the two peoples lived on different sides of a deep cultural divide, perhaps the most sharply defined of those in effect in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia” a view which Chandler, in answer to an objection from me,  said then that he no longer held, although this statement was maintained on the same page in the second and third editions of his History, published in 1992 and 2000, p. 153 in the fourth, and in the Khmer translation of his book, p.137. Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over, first edition, New York, Simon and Schuster 1986, p. 337; second edition, New York, Public Affairs, p. 329, where there is no credit to Chandler. Further citations from Becker’s book, unless otherwise noted, are from the second edition. Unacknowledged borrowing from scholars is one of Becker’s notable defects. (below, note 334). See also Philip Short, Pol Pot, London, John Murray, 2004, p. 41, typically without reference to predecessors.

[21] Michael Vickery, “Champa Revised”, 2005, long version available as ARI WPS No. 37   at the following URL: http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps05_037.pdf; “Histoire du Champa”, Tresors de l’Art du Vietnam La Sculpture du Champa, Paris, Musée Guimet, 2005, pp. 23-35; and on nam tiến note 57 below.

[22] These were the campaigns of the Cham leader Che [a Cham princely title] Bong Nga [a name known only from Vietnamese records]. See Georges Maspero, Le royaume de Champa, pp. 203-220; and Vickery, “Champa Revised”. See also John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan, “The Last Great King of Classical Southeast Asia: ‘Che Bong Nga’ and Fourteenth Century Champa”, to be published in a volume of papers from the 2004 Champa conference in Singapore.

[23] . Vickery, “Champa Revised”, Yoneo Ishii, ed., The Junk Trade from Southeast Asia, Translations from the Tôsen Fusetsu-gaki, 1674-1723, pp. 153-193, showing that in the 17^th century Cambodia in certain periods even outstripped Ayutthaya in trade with Japan; Chris Baker, “Ayutthaya Rising: From the Land or From the Sea”.

[24] On the Iberians in Cambodia in the 16^th century see Bernard P Groslier,  Angkor et le cambodge au XVIe siecle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “L’Introduction de l’Islam au Campā”, BEFEO, LXVI, 1979, pp. 255-287; the majority of Cham in Viet Nam, in the Phan Tiet-Phan Rang area,  have not converted to Islam. Chandler, in his A History, has ignored the political-economic importance of the reign of Cambodia’s Moslem king, passing it off with the traditional explanation that he had fallen in love with a Malay girl. See Carool Kersten, “Cambodia’s Muslim King: Khmer and Dutch Sources on the Conversion of Reameathipadei (1642-58)”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, February 2006. I wish to apologize for my letter (TLS, 14 December 1984, p. 1447) denying the importance of Prof. R.B. Smith’s criticism of Chandler’s neglect of this subject.

[25] Cambodia’s decline in the 18^th century still lacks adequate scholarly treatment.

[26] For the first Vietnamese intervention see Mak Phoeun and Po Dharma, “La première intervention militaire vietnamienne au Cambodge (1658-1659)”, BEFEO LXIII (1984), pp. 285-318. For subsequent involvement of Thai and Vietnamese in Cambodia see Chandler, A History.

[27] Cited from my “Notes on the Political Economy of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK)”, Journal of Contemporary Asia (JCA), Vol. 20, No. 4 (1990), pp. 435-436. Ethnic minority rights are guaranteed by the Vietnamese constitution, but unmentioned in the Thai; and primary education in minority languages is even less conceivable in Thailand than among the Cham and Khmer of Vietnam. I must emphasize that my purpose here is not to single out Thailand for blame, for in these matters Thailand’s conduct has been well within standard international norms. The purpose is to call attention to the way in which Viet Nam’s positions have been viewed through the blinkers of colonialist and imperialist prejudices, and, on the part of academics, intellectually dishonest analyses.

     An example of such a map of Vietnam is in Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy, The War After the War, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, New York, London, 1986, p. 50. Part of the problem, at least among journalists, is that the gradual encroachment by Thai into areas of Mon and Khmer population is not recognized in standard Thai history, and too many western historians of Thailand have given it too little emphasis, an example being the currently popular version, David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 1991, which is hardly more than an English version of a Thai school textbook. For a succinct corrective see Evans and Rowley, pp. 6-7.

[28] . The French foisted the canard that the protectorate agreement protected Cambodia from Viet Nam; but since most of southern Viet Nam had already been conquered by the French, there was no longer any danger to Cambodia from that quarter. Moreover, the French argued that after conquering southern Viet Nam in 1862-1867 they had inherited suzerainty over Cambodia from Viet Nam, a suzerainty which they magnanimously converted to a mere protectorate in their 1863 treaty of “Friendship and Commerce” with Cambodia. In the original French the preamble of the treaty said that one of its purposes was to “régler... les conditions auxquelles S.M. l’Empereur des Français consent à transformer ses droits de suzeraineté sur le royaume du Cambodge en un protectorat” (Georges Taboulet, La geste française en Indochine, Tome II, p. 624 ).

[29] Alain Forest, Le Cambodge et la colonisation francaise, histoire d’une colonisation sans heurts [sic!] (1897-1920), p. 6.

[30] Royal Ratanakosin Chronicle, Fourth Reign [King Mongkut], Royal Library Edition [in Thai], “Röang möang khamer [Cambodian affairs] (continued)”, pp. 597-598.

[31] For details of the taxation, see Chandler, A History, fourth edition, Westview Press, 2008 pp. 187-8, 191-2.

[32] Instead of ‘feudalism’ I would prefer to say ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’, but fear it would evoke controversies irrelevant to, and distracting from, the present discussion. The crucial difference from feudalism is that in the relevant Asiatic societies private property in land was absent or very weak, and the conditions for formation of an urban bourgeoisie of the European type were lacking.

     For positive treatments of  ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ as an explanatory category see Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London, Verso Edition, 1981; and George Konrad and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979.  Reactionaries take note that these authors were 1970s dissidents from respectively the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and communist Hungary whose works were hailed, at least as long as they were not understood, by western anti-communists.

[33] Note that Marx and Engels agreed with the most right-wing imperialists that capitalism was a progressive stage, and that colonialism would usher in this progressive stage in Asia and Africa.

[34] Thus the ‘stop in the mind’ which I evoked in Cambodia A Political Survey, pp. 63, 102, 117, 195.

[35] For an elegant description of the situation in Cambodia see Chandler, A History, fourth edition, pp. 187-194, in particular his treatment of the trial for the killing of the French Résident Bardez, pp. 192-193.

[36] On Burma and the disparity with Cambodia see Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power (second edition), New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 19.

     [2008: It should also be noted that the anti-sodomy law under which an anti-regime Malay politician has been harassed in recent years, has nothing to do with supposed Islamic detestation of homosexuality (casual buggery among ‘heterosexuals’ is rather common in Malaysia, and when not a political issue is ignored by the authorities), but is a British colonial relic, as is the law for indefinitely renewable two-year political incarceration without trial. The same British colonial laws have also been preserved in non-Muslim Singapore, and for the same reasons-they were seen useful for new regimes who wanted independence, but not the greater democracy which accompanied imperial breakdown in the Mother country. Insistence on a historical treatment and on the brutality of colonial conquest is Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps A Personal History of Burma, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.]

[37] See Ariffin Omar, Bangsa Melayu, Malay Conceptions of Democracy and Community 1945-1950, Southeast Asian Historical Monographs, Oxford University Press, 1993.

[38] See sources in note 72, below.

[39] See George Konrad and Ivan Szelényi, in general, and pp. 85-86; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire  of Louis Bonaparte, remarks on “the relationship of the political and literary representatives of a class to the class that they represent”, pp. 461-462 in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York, W.W. Norten & Company, Inc., 1972, and pp. 281-282 in Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, Oevres choisis, Tome I, Moscou, Éditions du Progrès, 1955.

[40] Examples in Thailand of rising lower-class intellectuals were Thianwan/Tianwan and K.S.R Kulap, both of whom spent time in prison for their writing. For Tianwan see Sulak Sivaraksa, “The Crisis of Siamese Identity”, in Craig J. Reynolds, ed., National Identity and its Defenders, Thailand 1939-1989, pp. 45, 57; and on Kulap see Craig Reynolds, “The case of K.S.R. Kulap: A Challenge to Royal Historical Writing in Late Nineteenth Century Thailand”, Journal of the Siam Society 61/2 (July 1973), pp. 63-90.

[41] See Michael Vickery, “Thai Regional Elites and the Reforms of King Chulalongkorn”, Journal of Asian Studies XXIX, 4 (August 1970), 863-881.

[42] I deliberately refrain here from drawing an obvious comparison with Central Europe in the 1930s, not because I think it is irrelevant, or uncomfortable, but in order to avoid a long discussion which is not relevant to the purpose of this book.

[43] Khieu Samphan, “L’Économie du Cambodge et ses problèmes d’industrialisation”, Paris 1959, published in English translation by Laura Summers as “Cambodia’s economy and Industrial Development”, Data Paper Number 111, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, March 1979; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 267.  For an interesting comment on the relevance of List, but without mention of Khieu Samphan, see Aidan Foster-Carter, “Friedrich List lives”, Inside Asia, September-October 1985, pp. 33-34. See also below, and note the misunderstanding of Khieu Samphan by Shawcross, text with n. 442, below.

[44] An example of a group with elite education, inherited wealth and potential privileged entry into state service are the Thiounn (pron. /chuon/) brothers, Mum, Thioeun, and Prasith, who became, and remained until the end, fervent Democratic Kampuchea/Khmer Rouge activists.

[45] A good example is Hou Yuon/h(Uyn; bjðashkrN_ (The Cooperative Question), Phnom Penh 1964, dedication, citing, sarcastically, Sihanouk’s expressed regret (in Peking) that he had not been born as an ordinary citizen, and the following introductory chapter. Hou Yuon was opposed to the extreme policies which later characterized Democratic Kampuchea. Craig Etcheson’s treatment of him as a Maoist and the most radical of the ‘Khmer Rouge’ intellectuals is mistaken (Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Boulder, Westview Press and London, Frances Pinter (Publishers), 1984, pp. 29, 51, 144, 170-171, 20). 

[46] See Jean Lacouture et Philippe Devillers, La fin d’une guerre, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1960.

[47] Journal of Oriental Studies, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, Volume XXX, Numbers 1 and 2 (1992), Special Issue, The Cold War and Beyond in Asia, pp. 87-118, from a paper presented at the 12th Conference of Historians of Asia, June 1991, Hong Kong. Ellipses indicate cuts from the original text, which, with respect to events, treats the situation from 1992, with some updating of detail, as indicated, to 2007

[48] On Truman’s responsibility see Carl Marzani, “On Interring Communism and Exalting Capitalism”, Monthly Review, Vol. 41 (January 1990), Special Supplement, pp. 1-32, pp. 11, 14.

[49] . See below, pp. 34-35.

[50] . Gary R. Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940-1950, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 312. The French Communist Party supported the French government in Algeria.

[51] . Recorded in Noam Chomsky, “The Wider War”, in For Reasons of State, New York, Pantheon, 1973, p. 192, citing a press conference of 12 November 1971, and US State Department Bulletin, 6 December 1971, p. 646.

[52] . Noam Chomsky, “The weak shall inherit nothing”, Guardian Weekly, 7 April 1991, p. 8.

[53] . Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954, Volume XVI, “The Geneva Conference”, p. 1026, “Memorandum by Chester L. Cooper and Joseph A. Yager of the United States Delegation to the Special Adviser (Heath).

[54] . Quoted from David Rieff, “Telling Foreign Truths”, Harper’s Magazine, November 1990, p. 15.

[55] . Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 1999, pp. 110-140

[56] . Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [Vol. 1], New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1948, p. 434, “There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but which seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans....Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the earth”. George Kennan, not to be confused with the more famous 20th-century diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan, traveled widely in Russia and wrote Siberia and the Exile System, New York and London, 1891.

[57] . As noted above, the parallel Drang nach Suden is still generally unrecognized in western scholarship, which focuses only on Vietnamese expansion, and attributes general benevolence to Thai policies toward Indochina, no doubt because of the rose-colored lenses which imperialist and colonialist attitudes have implanted in the eyes of all concerned. Of course the ‘southward push’, nam tiến in writings about Vietnam, was never a steady process, and has been exaggerated with respect to Vietnam, but almost totally ignored in the historiography of Thailand. For a valuable revision of nam tiến see Keith Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region”, The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 4 (November 1998), p. 951 “I do not believe that such an event [nam tiến] ever took place”.

[58] . Braú rāj baºśāvatār kruº ratanakosin [Royal Ratanakosin Chronicle], Rājakāl dī 3 (Third Reign), [Bangkok, National Library Edition, 1962], p. 366.

[59] . See note 20 above and related text.

[60] . Braú rāj baºśāvatār kruº ratanakosin [Royal Ratanakosin Chronicle], Rājakāl dī 1 (First Reign), Bangkok, National Library Edition, 1962, pp. 46-7, 70-1, 129-33, 143-6, 156-7, 159, 176-7, 189-90, 219, 226, 240, 245-7, 258-9.

[61] . King Taksin is recorded as addressing Vietnamese officials in Vietnamese (“braú rāj borihār doy bhāsā ñuon”) in Braú Rāj baśāvatār chabab braú rāj hatthalekhā (‘The Royal Autograph Chronicle’), Bangkok, 1977, p. 640. For the Chinese titles of Taksin and Rama I see G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1957, pp. 20-28.

[62] . Michael Vickery, Review of Robert B. Jones, “Thai titles and Ranks Including a Translation of Traditions of Royal Lineage by King Chulalongkorn”, in Journal of the Siam Society, Volume 62, Part 1 (January 1974), pp. 158-173; see p. 171, reference to A. Laborde, “Les titres et grades héréditaires à la Cour d’Annam”, which shows a system of royal family ranks, including declining descent, resembling very closely the Thai system. See also Michael Vickery, “The Constitution of Ayutthaya”, in Thai Law: Buddhist Law, Essays on the Legal History of Thailand, Laos and Burma, edited by Andrew Huxley, Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1996, pp. 133-210.

[63] . For basic details, but refusal to recognize the equivalence of pro-Thai and pro-Vietnamese factions among Cambodian royalty end elite, see Chandler, A History, chapter 7.

[64] . Similarly, the greater enemy for the Lao states on the eastern side of the Mekong was Bangkok, in spite of similarity of culture, and even language, which Cambodia did not share, with Bangkok.

[65] . For details see above, p. 15.

[66] . Thailand’s Case was published in Bangkok in 1941. The author’s name has been Romanized in different ways.

[67] . Chandler, A History, pp. 166-70. [2009: The Thai attitude is again apparent in the revival of conflict over the temple of Preah Vihear/Khao Phra Viharn]

[68] . Michael Vickery, “Looking Back at Cambodia [1945-1974]”, in Ben Kiernan and Chantou Boua, eds., Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942- 1981, London, Zed Press, 1982, pp. 89-113; David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 14-26; Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, London, Verso, 1985, pp. 41-56. Unless referred to the second edition (2004) all notes to this work are to the first. On some matters the second edition is more detailed, with more and better sources. Unfortunately the index, already inadequate in the first edition, was not updated to include new names in the second. 

[69] . One prominent figure who ridiculed the very idea of independence was Sihanouk’s maternal uncle Prince Sisowath Monireth, who was behind a French-language newspaper with a Khmer name, Le Krabei Prey (‘The Wild Buffalo’), which ridiculed the pretensions of the new generation of Cambodian politicians and at least implicitly argued that Cambodia was not ready for independence.

[70] . Sihanouk, in contrast to Lon Nol and Pol Pot, only insisted on recognition by the Vietnamese of Cambodia’s existing frontiers. See further below.

[71] . The information in this, and in the next two paragraphs, is from Cambodge, a newspaper published in Phnom Penh, respectively from no. 94, 17 July 1945; no. 87, 6 July; no.96, 17 July; no.116, 11 August; no.9, 30 March; no. 110, 4 August; no. 121, 17 August; no. 79, 27 June; no. 124, 21 August; no. 126, 23 August; no. 127, 24 August; See also Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 51. 

[72] . So’n Ngoc Thanh ended his days as the leader of an anti-communist and anti-Vietnamese movement in Cochinchina which actively supported the Khmer Republic during 1970-75, and among his 1945 followers were several who later became part of the Democratic Kampuchea leadership, the most anti-Vietnamese of all Cambodian factions. On this period see Chandler, Tragedy, chapter 1; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, chapter 2.

[73] . Cambodge, nos. 140, 8 September and 144, 13 September on allied arrival; no. 149, 19 September on status of Vietnamese; no. 172-173, 18-19 October, Murray’s communiqué, and Kret no. 305 of 17 Oct naming Monireth head of government; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 50-52.

[74] . Details of cabinet membership from Université Bouddhique Preah Sihanouk Raj, Les élites khmères. Phnom Penh, Institut Bouddhique, 1965, based on a doctoral thesis by Phouk Chhay.

[75] . Chandler, A History, pp. 176-177.

[76] . Aymonier, Le Cambodge III, pp. 792-793; Chandler, A History,  p. 118; Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 55-56; David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, pp. 271-2

[77] . See for example, John B. Haseman, The Thai Resistance Movement During the Second World War, Bangkok, Chalernmit Press, n.d., apparently reprinted from a monograph of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University.

[78] . See Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 55-56.

[79] . See Michael Vickery. Review of Chao Anou 1767-1829 pasason lao lee asi akhane, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, XXI, 2 (1990), p. 445. M.R. Seni and Kukrit Pramoj are direct descendants of King Rama II (1809-1824). The Democrat Party and the overseas branches of the Free Thai movement in World War II seem to have represented efforts by low-ranking royalty, and elite sympathizers, marginalized by the anti-royalist coup of 1932, to regain political influence which they probably considered their due.

[80] . For details see Vickery, “Looking Back “, pp. 89-113.

[81] . Note the wide ideological difference between the Thai and the Cambodian ‘Democrat’ parties, the former elitist and royalist, the latter moderately leftist, probably to some degree republican, and consisting of  ‘new men’, not the traditional elite. One similarity was that the Cambodian Democrats were also led by a minor prince, Sisowath Youthevong, whose ideology was quite different from the Thai Democrat leaders, but interestingly he was, like them, from a branch of royalty outside the dynastic mainstream. See Chandler, Tragedy, chapters 1-2; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, chapters 4, 6; and Vickery, “Looking Back”, pp. 89-113.

[82] . For treatment of the 1952-53 events as a coup d’état, see Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 61-67. Although this Consultative Assembly was chosen autocratically, party participation was maintained in the same proportions as in the previous National Assembly. The Democrats had 43 of the 74 members, and the Secretary was a left Democrat, So’n Phu’o’c Tho (Punakkar, Phnom Penh Khmer-language newspaper, organ of Lon Nol’s Khmer Renovation Party, no. 136, 19 March 1953).

[83] Gouvernement Royal du Cambodge, Livre Jaune sur les revendications de l’indépendence du Cambodge (Depuis le 5 Mars 1953), [Phnom Penh, 1953], pp. 3-18, 5 mars 1953, “1er Message du Souverain à M. le Président de la République, Président de l’Union Française, exposant la situation générale du Cambodge et les problèmes qui se posent”.

[84] . This position was elaborated in Sarin Chhak, Les frontières du Cambodge, Tome 1, Paris, Librairie Dalloz, 1966.

[85] . Lacouture et Devillers, La fin d’une guerre, pp. 270-1; and see below on the 1955 election. [Sam Sary’s son, Sam Rainsy, following the 1998 election, tried the same technique in an effort to derail the election results and formation of a new government.]

[86] . Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-54, Volume XVI, “The Geneva Conference”, p. 1023 Memorandum by Chester Cooper and Joseph A. Yager, Geneva, June 3, 1954.

[87] . Chandler, Tragedy, chapter 2; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 153-164; Vickery, “Looking Back”, p. 97.

[88] . Wilfred Burchett, The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle, London, Vanguard Books and Zed Press, 1981; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 140-153.

[89] . See Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 197, and references there. 

[90] . ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, from 1976, was the official name of what is popularly called the ‘Khmer Rouge regime’ of 1975-1979. The standard document is Pol Pot’s ‘Black Book’, original foreign language edition, “Livre noir: faits et preuves des actes d’agression et d’annexion du Vietnam contre le Kampuchea”, Phnom Penh, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, September 1978. For an accessible interpretation see Stephen R. Heder, ‘The Kampuchean-Vietnamese Conflict’, Southeast Asian Affairs 1979, Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1980, p. 13, and n. 25.

[91] . Which is not to say that such was not the intention of the western powers. See sources listed in Kiernan, How Pol Pot, chapter 5, note 8.

[92] . Vickery, “Looking Back”, pp. 96-99.

[93] Chandler, Tragedy, p. 77.

[94] For more detail see Vickery, “Looking Back”, pp.96-99; Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 155-164. The full name of Sihanouk’s party was ‘Sangkum Reastr Niyum’, which was rendered as ‘Popular Socialist Community’. See Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 83-84 and n. 94, on dishonest balloting and fake reporting of results.

[95] . Chandler, Tragedy, p. 136

[96] . Chandler, Tragedy, p. 98.

[97] . See Kiernan, How Pol Pot, chapter 6.

[98] . See Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 99-107, on the Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon plots.

[99] . On Cambodian profits from aid to Vietnam see Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 188-9; and on Thai transport of arms to the Khmer Rouge see M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, “Unholy Alliance Must End”, The Nation (Bangkok), 22 July 1988, in which he warned that there is a strong interest among some of the Thai military in keeping the supply routes to the Khmer Rouge across Thailand open; and “[t]o resolve the Khmer Rouge problem means to sever a relationship, which is based...also on vested interests, and an attempt to do so may prove to be both futile and dangerous”; and M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, “Indonesia can play a leading role”, The Nation, 28 February 1990. All further references to ‘The Nation’, unless otherwise designated, are to the Bangkok newspaper of that name.

     For a touch of humor we may note Gary Klintworth’s claim (Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing service, 1989, p. v), that he developed his interest in Cambodia as an ‘intelligence’ (military, of course) operative in 1967, checking out “the carrying capacity of bicycles on the road from Sihanoukville to Ratanakiri”. Had intelligence operative Klintworth never looked at a map? He has obviously confused the wide US-built Sihanouk highway from the southern port of Kompong Som/Sihanoukville with the narrow jungle ‘Sihanouk Trail’ in Cambodia’s northeast, some 600 km distant. No wonder the Australians and Americans never discovered what was going on. No bicycles ever carried supplies out of Sihanoukville. Transport was on Cambodian army trucks supplied by General Lon Nol with Sihanouk’s connivance. Nor did the road lead to Ratanakiri. It went straight to the Vietnamese border in southeastern Cambodia. The bicycle traffic was through the jungles from northern Vietnam, via Laos and Cambodia’s northeastern province, to southern Vietnam, the ‘Sihanouk Trail’.

[100] . Ben Kiernan, , “The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath, 1967-70: The Origins of Cambodia’s Liberation Movement”, Parts I-II, in Monash University, Centre of southeast Asian Studies, Working Papers, nos. 4 and 5, n.d [1975-76].; Kiernan, How Pol Pot; Chandler, Tragedy.

[101] . See Norodom Sihanouk and Wilfred Burchett, My War with the CIA, London, Penguin Books, The Penguin Press, 1973; and for more nuanced detail of possible US roles, Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 190-199.

[102] . The second group was represented by the founders and publishers of the French-language Phnom Penh newspaper Phnom Penh Presse. A still-active survivor is Douc Rasy.

[103] .  Malcolm Caldwell and Lek Tan, Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1973, pp. 168-9; Chandler, Tragedy, p. 168. Recognition by the NLF came on 31 May 1967, and by the DRV on 8 June.

[104] . Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 348

[105] . Becker, When the War Was Over, pp. 147-150; Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 216-220; Kiernan, How Pol Pot, chapter 8.

[106] . Jeffrey Race, “The January 1975 Thai Election: Preliminary Data and Inferences”, Asian Survey (AS), Vol. XV, Number 4 (April 1975), pp. 375-382.

[107] . Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm, Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979, chapter 6; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, chapter 2.

[108] . Letter from Herman to The Progressive, 1 September 1997, with criticism of its issue of September 1997, kindly provided to me by Herman; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, second edition, p. ix. Reverse intellectual history is seen in Shawcross and continues in particular in the work of David Chandler. See below, note 761, on Chandler’s reference to Ceausescu; and in his A History, fourth edition p. 296 on the “Leninist Politics” of Pol Pot, against which see chapter 5 of Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982 and comment below, pp. 285, ff., on Friedman.

[109] . Michael Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”, in David A. Ablin & Marlowe Hood, editors, The Cambodian Agony, Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1987, pp. 293-331; Mr. Jean-Jacques Fresard, 8 February 1991, in a CCSDPT Open Session, in Bangkok.

[110] . Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 364-368; T.D. Allman, “Sihanouk’s Sideshow”, Vanity Fair (April 1990), pp. 151-60, 226-34.

[111] . Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 435.

[112] . Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 348-349.

[113] . National Foreign Assessment Center, Central Intelligence Agency, “Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe”, [Washington, D.C., May 1980]; Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”, BCAS, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1982, pp. 45-54.

[114] . Michael Battye, Reuters, New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), 2 May 1979; Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) Yearbook 1980, p. 293.

[115] . Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp System in Thailand”.

[116] . See Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society; Vickery, “Cambodia 1988”, Asien, Nr. 28, April 1988, Hamburg, pp. 1-19; Vickery, “Notes on the Political Economy of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK)”, JCA, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1990), pp. 435-465.

[117] . See Michael Vickery, “A Critique of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Kampuchea Mission of November 1984”, JCA, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1988), p. 115, for KPNLF brutality. For the incompetence and corruption of the Sihanoukists see the reports of the first attempt to sell off the Cambodian national heritage on the Thai market initiated by Sihanouk’s group in 1982 – ”Sihanouk endorses timber agreement”, The Nation, 27 November 1982 citing Buor Hell, a high-ranking official in Sihanouk’s group, and a distant relative of the prince, for the news that they had signed an agreement with a private Thai company to supply one million cubic meters of Cambodian timber. See also Buor Hell’s statements reported in The Bangkok Post, 27 October 1982, and in the Asian Wall Street Journal, 29 November, 1982, p. 1. A few days later Sihanouk denied that he had backed the deal, but nevertheless was quoted as saying he “hoped that the contract would be approved by other members of [the coalition]”.

[118] . See Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, “Preliminary Summary of Findings and Conclusions, Kampuchea Mission”, New York, November 1984; their final report, Kampuchea: After the Worst, New York, August 1985; Michael Vickery, “A Critique of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Kampuchea Mission of November 1984”, JCA, Vol. 18 No. 1 (1988), pp. 108-116; Amnesty International, “Kampuchea Political Imprisonment and Torture”, June 1987. See comment on these reports below, pp. 304-329.

[119] . Vickery, “Notes on the Political Economy of the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea”, p. 437 and note 12.

[120] . Vickery, “Postscript: 1983”, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 291-98. [On the propaganda campaign about Vietnamese troops in Cambodia see Cambodia: A Political Survey, Phnom Penh, Funan Press, 2007, pp. 14-42].

[121] .  See Michael Vickery, “Cambodia”, in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long, eds., Coming to Terms, Indochina, the United States and the War, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1991, pp. 89-128.  A summary of the Road Map was published in “A US-VN normalization road map”, The Nation, 25 October 1991;

[122] . Ibid. Vietnam must “convince Phnom Penh to sign and fully implement the Paris Agreement [of October 1991]”, and “convince the Phnom Penh authorities to agree formally to cooperate on PoW/MIA matters...”. Apparently the US has learned nothing since the Paris Agreement of 1973 which also mistakenly assumed an ability by Vietnam to coerce the Cambodian communists. On a visit to Bangkok in July 1991 Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon confirmed the linkage between “a solution to the war in Cambodia” and normalizing relations with Viet Nam (“US links VN ties to MIA issue, Cambodia peace”, Bangkok Post, 29 July 1991).

[123] . Shultz was quoted in the Bangkok Post, 13 July 1985. [See more detail of Shultz’s bullying of ASEAN and Australian Foreign Minister Bill Hayden in David Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia 1991-99, London, Curzon, 2001, p. 15].

[124] . See below, Vickery, “Notes on the Political Economy of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea”, pp. 454-5. The World Bank report, Cambodia Agenda for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, June 1992, was very positive about Cambodia’s achievements and prospects.

[125] . For a discussion of the true character of the sequence of events trumpeted to the world as ‘peace proposals’ resulting in a ‘peace agreement’, see Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 14-42.

[126] . Since agreeing to return to Phnom Penh as President of the SNC, Sihanouk has taken pains to state that FUNCINPEC is no longer his party, but is led by his son Norodom Ranariddh. During the last days of October 1991 there were nightly announcements of this on Phnom Penh television.

[127] . These provisions did not work out the way I projected here, and the proportional representation by province provision backfired. See below 452, n.689

[128] . Sihanouk seems to have given the new US envoy to Phnom Penh covert signals to subvert, not himself as the US did in the 1960s, but the existing government in Phnom Penh, the SOC, saying, “‘Since you are rich you can help the Cambodian people who are so poor...Your money should not go into the pockets of our officials or our civil servants...You should go directly to the people’“. “[T]he United States should manage the funds and hire workers itself rather than trust the government, he said... ‘We cannot avoid corruption....Please don’t give directly money to them [the SOC] or even materials – even cars, because they may use the cars for their families....Asia is Asia, eh’“ (“Sihanouk warns America: Don’t oust me again”, Bangkok Post, 20 November 1991, AFP).

[129] . Nayan Chanda, “‘Isolate Khmer Rouge’, Sihanouk chides UNTAC for feeble response”, FEER, 30 July 1992, pp. 18-19; “Khieu Samphan surprise”, New Sunday Times (Kuala Lumpur), 30 August 1992, followed in the New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), 2 September 1992 by a photo suggesting intimate friendship between Sihanouk and Khieu Samphan.

[130] . Note that this was written in 1992; but as described below, pp. 441, 496, the UNTAC, and Sihanouk’s, game plan required a vigorous KR.

[131] . See Victor Delahaye, La plaine des joncs et sa mise en valeur, Rennes: Imprimerie de l`Ouest Eclair, 1928; and L. Malleret, L`Archéologie du Delta du Mekong tome I, Paris, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1959, pp. 6-7. 

[132] . Nayan Chanda, “Land Erosion, Cambodians question status of country’s borders”, FEER, 3 September 1992, pp. 16-17. Chanda’s bias appears in his acceptance of a US State Department opinion that all but one square kilometer of the disputed areas went to Vietnam. For an objective treatment of the 1985 treaty see Evans and Rowley, p. 165. [In fact, writing in 1992, I was too optimistic here about the end of irredentism on the Vietnamese border. Since the 1993 election, and particularly in 1997-98 and again in 2006, anti-Vietnamese chauvinism and irredentism have been cultivated by the extremist opposition to the government to greater levels than ever before.See Vickery, Cambodia: a Political Survey, pp. 183-192.

[133] . See further on this below, pp. 124, 427.

[134] . Published in News From Kampuchea, I, 4, Waverly, N.S.W., Australia, Committee of Patriotic Kampucheans, October 1977, pp. 1-31.

[135] . Paper presented at the JCA 20^th Anniversary Conference, Manila 10-12 November, 1989, published in JCA, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1990), pp. 435-436. Pagination here and footnote numbering are different from the original.

[136] . Recorded in Noam Chomsky, “The Wider War”, in For Reasons of State, p. 192, citing a press conference of 12 November 1971, and U.S. State Department Bulletin, 6 December 1971, p. 646.

[137] . I have borrowed this concept from Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, quotation from p. 169, admittedly tearing it out of the context for which he devised it.

[138] . In general this book, although ‘hailed’ as brilliant history, has refused to take a critical look at anything which might undermine U.S. regime orthodoxy. Perhaps this is why it has been ‘hailed’.

[139] . Ethnic minority rights are guaranteed by the Vietnamese constitution, but unmentioned in the Thai; and primary education in minority languages is even less conceivable in Thailand than among the Cham and Khmer of Viet Nam. I must emphasize that my purpose here, and in the following paragraphs, is not to single out Thailand for blame, for in these matters Thailand’s conduct has been well within standard international norms. The purpose is to call attention to the way in which Viet Nam’s positions have been viewed through the blinkers of colonialist and imperialist prejudices, and, on the part of academics, intellectually dishonest analyses.

[140] . A hitherto little-known example of violent Thai intolerance, the murder of 7 Thai Christians by police in 1940 “for refusing to deny their faith”, was revealed by the Bangkok Post, 26 September 1989. Another report said they had “been suspected of working for French spies” (Bangkok Post, 19 September 1989). The Nation 23/10/89, “Pope beatifies seven Thai roman Catholics, French”; “Philip Siphong, a lay catechist and head of the Thai Catholic community of Songkhon, a village in Nakhon Phanom, was killed on December 26, 1940, for refusing to renounce his faith after his arrest”. “Thai military authorities viewed allegiance to ‘western’ religion in wartime as treachery”. “The same day sisters Agnes Phila and Lucy Khambang, who taught at the community, and four of their Thai companions aged between 14 and 21 were shot by firing squad.”

[141] . George McT. Kahin, Intervention, New York, Anchor Books, 1987, pp. 333-335. Cannon fodder for rent was also provided by the ROK and Philippines, each of which made a better deal, according to Kahin, than the Thai.

[142] . David Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest”.

[143] . New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), 9 July 1988.

[144] . Michael Vickery, “Cambodia”, in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long, eds., Coming to Terms, Indochina, the United States and the War, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1991, pp. 89-128.  

[145] . The Office of National Assessments is the research branch of Australian intelligence.  The pseudo-statistical froth is no accident. The person in question is an American (an infiltrator in ONA?), and served in the Vietnam War, where he perhaps learned how to manipulate such figures. Unlike the CIA, in Australia the thugs and bookworms are organized separately. The thugs have been successfully ridiculed in Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence. While ONA awaits its Toohey and Pinwill I offer the above as an example of the gems which might be unearthed. The 1/300 odds is cited in Ben Kiernan, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, edited by Ben Kiernan, New Haven, Yale, 1993, p. 193.

[146] . By prejudiced enemies I am referring to the New-York based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, whose work on Cambodia I have discussed in “A Critique of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Kampuchea Mission of November 19894”, JCA 18/1 (1988), pp. 108-116 and Amnesty International, whose special reports on Cambodia since 1986 have been designed to undermine the PRK. Nevertheless, they have at most reported only hundreds of allegedly illegal arrests; and hardly that number of defectors have been boasted by the coalition groups on the Thai border. When on 20 September 1989, 116 PRK troops surrendered on the Thai border it was reported as “the largest ever [defection] by Phnom Penh soldiers fighting resistance guerillas along the frontier” (The Nation, 21 September 1989). Since 50% desertions imply tens of thousands, who could not simply go back to home and work, they would have to be forming dissident groups within the country, something which no one has suggested.

[147] . Details are discussed below.

[148] . See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982 for details.

[149] . Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 266-7, 288, where I note that the analysis of W.E. Willmott, “Analytical Errors of the Kampuchean Communist Party”, Pacific Affairs, 45/2 (Summer 1981), is correct, but that he was mistaken in believing that revolutionary potential among the peasantry was therefore weaker. Recently Kate Frieson, “The Political Nature of Democratic Kampuchea”, Pacific Affairs, Fall 1988, pp. 405-550, has resurrected the question, but in a not entirely straightforward – indeed, even devious – way. She has assimilated my argument that Cambodian peasants threatened by usury and indebtedness could become revolutionary to the Cambodian Communist Party argument that they were dispossessed by landlords, and used Willmott against both, choosing to ignore my discussion of these matters in Cambodia, with which she was thoroughly familiar, while citing a remark about “rural dispossessed” from a conference paper which summarized what I had discussed more carefully in Cambodia. See Frieson, pp. 421-2.

[150] . Quoted from the 2 December 1978 programme of the National Union Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea; see Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society, p. 128.

[151] . See examples in Vickery, Cambodia. In 1988 an OXFAM employee in Phnom Penh informed me that he had met peasants who told of their initial satisfaction with DK, and in particular the opportunity it gave them to exploit city evacuees.

[152] . See Vickery, Cambodia, chapter 4.

[153] . In four visits to Phnom Penh since 1981 I have yet to meet anyone occupying his/her pre-1975 residence, though I have been informed that one technocrat was given his old house as an inducement to work for the new government. In Khao-I-Dang in 1980 I met someone who had reached his Phnom Penh house in 1979 while it was still empty, and could have occupied it, but chose to leave for Thailand instead.

[154] . As an example, U.S.-educated agronomist Kong Samol, served as Minister of Agriculture from 1981 until he was promoted to Deputy P.M. in charge of Agriculture and Rubber in 1986. Probably few ministers of agriculture under Sihanouk or Lon Nol had equivalent technical qualifications. One exception was Chuon Saodi, with degrees in agronomy from Belgium, who served as Secretary of State for agriculture in 1964-5.

[155] . In Adelaide I met a Cambodian whose family had carried 10 kg of gold out of Phnom Penh in 1975, had used half of it to procure favors during the DK period, and tried to carry the rest across the Thai border into the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp. Much of it was then forfeited to border guards, but still enough remained to start a relatively comfortable life in Australia.

[156] . On the flow of Cambodian wealth into Thailand via the refugee camp system, see Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”,  pp. 293-331.

[157] . Nayan Chanda, “A Phoenix from the Ashes of Death”, FEER, 4 April 1980.

[158] . See Vickery, Kampuchea, pp. 131-134 for details of salary levels and comparative prices in 1981-1984, and comparison with 1962.

[159] . Kavi Chongkittavorn, “Political Reforms in Cambodia”, The Nation, 11 October 1989. Thus the exchange rate of the riel is cited as 7.35 baht, or 180+ to the dollar, against 150-155 in November 1988, a change of 13-15%. The food price increases cited by Kavi, however, represent an increase equivalent to that cited for salaries; but is seems unlikely that such drastic rises in prices and wages would not be more strongly reflected in the exchange rate. In another article, “Inflation is our immediate enemy”, The Nation, 4 October 1989, Kavi reported that the new official exchange rate was 190 to the dollar, against 210-215 on the free market.

[160] . Michael Ellman, “Agricultural Productivity Under Socialism”, World Development, Vol.9, No. 9/10 (1981), 979-989, see p. 983.

[161] . See Vickery, Kampuchea, pp. 137-146, for more detail.

[162] . Kavi Chongkittavorn, “Inflation is our immediate enemy”, The Nation, 4 October 1989

[163] . James Scott, “Socialism and Small Property – or – two cheers for the Petty Bourgeoisie”, Peasant Studies 12/3 (Spring 1985), 185- 197.See also Michael Ellman, “Agricultural Productivity under Socialism”, World Development 9, 9/10 (1981), pp. 979-989. Perhaps if Scott realized he was arguing in defense of the PRK he would cheer less loudly for the petty bourgeoisie.

[164] . This is a good individual example of the social and economic disintegration which was just beginning in the 1960s.

[165] . Pracheachon (Peoples Revolutionary Party newspaper), no. 151, 27 March 1987.

[166] . Pracheachon, no. 153, 3 April 1987, referring to the situation in Ratanakiri Province in the northeast.

[167] . The prewar free rate was 50, declining to 120-150 during 1970, and thereafter disastrously until 1975. 

[168] . “Inflation is our immediate enemy”, The Nation, 4 October 1989, interview with Cha Rieng. Tea Banh interview in Matichon weekly no. 445, 8 October 1989, p. 8. Although Tea Banh’s figures seem far too low, they at least represent a beginning of statistical glasnost.

[169] . FEER 3 May 1990, p. 66, for the current rate.

[170] . Nauvarat Suksamran, “Thanit – the man behind the Thai-Cambodian trade relations”, The Nation, 10 September 1989, profiles a businessman and Chat Thai Party politician, who has developed extensive trading links with the Koh Kong Province administration, and who is thus able to import hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of Cambodian hardwood for his own sawmill, while “others face a great deal of difficulty...because of the nation-wide logging ban in Thailand”. The quantities cited the article, however, are probably exaggerated, for they represented nearly the entire projected output of timber in the 5-year plan.

[171] . James Pringle, “‘Rampant graft’ hurting image of Hun Sen regime”, Bangkok Post, 21 September 1989, citing convincing examples from interviews and the Cambodian press, in spite of the possibly unsympathetic attitude of the writer (thus he labeled as “leftist-leaning” a foreign relief official who remarked that “We [the western world] complained they were too socialist, so they liberalized the economy, and along with materialism came corruption”).

[172] . James Pringle, “‘Rampant graft’“, reports that “peasants now have 15-year title to the land”.

[173] . The Nation, 7 July 1986, p.5, interview with Jose Maria Sison. Compliance with debt obligations is not comparable, for Cambodian debt is held mainly by the Soviet Union, and a bilateral agreement on repayment seems to have been made.

[174] . FEER, “Intelligencer”, 1 June 1989, p. 10

[175] . Susumu Awanohara, “US, Japan block IMF effort to support Vietnam, fiscal interdiction”, FEER 28 September 1989, pp. 22-23; further quotations below from this source. One might wonder what leverage Viet Nam now has on the PRK to make them accede to U.S. demands, now that Vietnamese troops have left. Or would the U.S. like Viet Nam to invade again to force compliance with U.S. requirements?

[176] . Chanda, Brother Enemy, p. 151. This report is called “Introductory Report No. 1718-VN”, dated 12 August 1977. Chanda dates the World Bank mission to Vietnam in January, but bank literature says February. I have so far been unable to obtain a copy of the report, and rely for its tenor mainly on Chanda together with references to it in subsequent bank literature.

[177] . Far Eastern Economic Review 1 Dec 1978.

[178] . Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 184,149 respectively. As Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley wrote, “as Le Duan put it...’accumulation from internal sources is non-existent’, the whole strategy [for development] depended on an influx of foreign aid to finance investment” (Red Brotherhood at War, p.38).

[179] . Stephen J. Morris, “Vietnam’s Vietnam”, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1985.

[180] . See below. Note 742.

[181] . Kavi Chongkittavorn, The Nation, 25 August 1989.

[182] . Juan Cameron, “What the Bankers did to Poland”, Fortune, 22 September 1980, pp. 125-128; Alex Pravda, “Poland 1980: From Premature Consumerism to Labour Solidarity”, Soviet Studies, vol. xxxiv, no. 2 (April 1982), pp. 167-199.

[183] . FEER 1 June 1989, p. 10.

[184] . TIME, 30 April 1990, pp. 24-26, “Which way to the Free Market?”

[185] . TIME, 16 October 1989, p. 40, reported that the U.S. administration has been reluctant to initiate new methods for tracking down drug money in electronic transfers, for fear of “doing anything to frighten away billions of dollars in private investment, including an estimated $200 billion in flight capital from Latin America, which has helped finance the huge federal budget deficits of the past eight years”. What this implies is that the US government, because of a surreptitious dependence on drug profits, cannot be completely serious in its now world-wide anti-drug campaign. It is unlikely to be merely coincidental that designated Third World drug producing areas are already, or potentially, areas of leftwing guerilla activity, and the increasingly militarized ‘anti-drug’ operations abroad represent a new opening to imperialism, while corresponding measures domestically foreshadow the danger of a police state. The cold war is not over, and when the American right says they ‘won’ it, they mean that Soviet retreat opens up opportunities for aggression in the Third World which they would not have dared undertake before.

[186] . This is even more true in 2009 than when I first wrote this.

[187] . Asiaweek, 24 June 1988, p. 6; FEER 16 June 1988, p. 14  and Karl Moskowitz, “What if they were one?”, FEER 22 June 1989, p. 56, respectively.

[188] . Alex Pravda, “Poland 1980: From ‘Premature Consumerism’ to Labour Solidarity”, Soviet Studies, vol xxxiv, no. 2 (April 1982), 167-99.

[189] . Paisal Sricharatchanya, FEER 25 May 1989, p. 32, wrote, “...until recently Bangkok’s Cambodia policy was predicated on the assumption that the Vietnamese would not genuinely leave Cambodia”.

[190] . Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”, BCAS, 14/4 (1982).

[191] . The preoccupation with ‘Pol Pot genocide’ as a willful aberration by a single leader and his close associates has tended to obscure, both within and outside Cambodia, the circumstance that the Cambodian revolutionaries won in 1975 because of overwhelming popular support, which their own policies subsequently dissipated.

[192] . Spencer Davis, “The men most likely to...”, FEER 28 March 1975; and Michael Vickery, “Cambodia’s mysterious leaders”, FEER 6 June 1975, p. 6.

[193] . Khieu Thirith is the wife of Ieng Sary. Keat Chhon was a university rector until 1968 and a minister in the Cambodian government in 1969. In 1970 he joined Sihanouk in Peking, and worked with the PDK until 1984. Then in 1992 he joined the SOC. In the 1993 election he became a Cambodian People’s Party deputy in the National Assembly, and became Minister of Finance and Economy in October 1994. For the fate of Poc Does Komar/Deuskomar, who did not survive the war, see Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea: : Preludes to Tragedy, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1979, reviewed below, pp. 109-113 ; and Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, Chapter 4, note 10 (p. 179).

[194] . It is now considered that the Cambodian communists who took refuge in Hanoi after the Geneva Accords in 1954 numbered around 1000. It is now certain that they were not prominent among the 1970-75 insurgent leadership, and that Saloth Sar/Pol Pot was not among them. Of course, he eventually visited Hanoi, the first time in 1965, two years after disappearing from Phnom Penh.

[195] . There is now more information about Cambodian communist organization than I had in 1975. The party which was established in 1951 was then called Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party. Beginning in 1960 it was taken over by the Pol Pot group, and the name changed to ‘Workers Party’. In 1966 the name was changed again to ‘Communist Party’, but that name was not made public until 1977. The Pracheachon Group was the legal communist front from 1955, contesting elections and publishing newspapers. Non Suon reappeared as a minister in the Democratic Kampuchea government after the end of the war, but in 1976 was arrested and executed.

[196] .Thiounn Mum had been a leader of the group of Marxist Khmer students in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s. After 1970 he joined Sihanouk in exile, and from 1975 until sometime in the 1980s he was a member of the Democratic Kampuchea inner circle. For several years he remained loyal to the Democratic Kampuchea group in exile on the Thai border, where he served as an intellectual front man, meeting journalists and diplomats. Since the final collapse of DK in 1998 he has lived in Paris. Two of his brothers, Dr. (Medicine) Thiounn Thioeun and Thiounn Prasith, were also early adherents of the revolution. A third brother, Thiounn Chum, a business man before 1975, was treated as an ordinary person from 1975 to 1978 when he was brought to Phnom Penh in a late effort to make use of educated persons. Their family was one of the highest in a new aristocracy based in the colonial bureaucracy. Their grandfather, Thiounn, starting out under the French as a clerk and interpreter, had been Minister of the Palace, and the most powerful among the ministers, from the end of the 19^th century until retirement in 1941, and their father Thiounn Hol, although of lesser official rank, moved in the highest royal and official circles.

[197] . Nayan Chanda, “The bloody border”, FEER, 12 April 1978; Michael Vickery, “Crossed lines on Cambodia”, FEER, 2 June 1978, pp. 6-7. On the cut, see my follow-up letter, below.

[198] . Pol Pot’s policy, after his rise to prominence in 1960-62, was also to overthrow Sihanouk, but not to form joint forces with the Lao and Vietnamese, and of course, he wanted a social revolution.

[199] . On Thiounn Mum see above, note 196. Norodom Phurissara left Phnom Penh to join the anti-Khmer Republic guerrillas in 1972, became the first Democratic Kampuchea Minister of Justice in 1975, and was arrested and executed in 1976 or 1977.

[200] . In those days Khieu Samphan was believed to belong to a different faction from Pol Pot. See Ben Kiernan, “Conflict in the Kampuchean Communist Movement”, JCA 10, 1/2 (1980).

[201] . This was erroneous. It has been established that Tou Samouth (as the name is now generally written in romanization), was killed in 1962, although there is still disagreement among researchers whether he was killed by the Pol Pot group or by Sihanouk’s police. Ben Kiernan has insisted that Tou Samouth death was because of intra-party rivalry, and organized by Pol Pot (Kiernan, How Pol Pot, second edition, pp. 241-2, while Chandler (Tragedy, p. 120) prefers to put the blame on Sihanouk while admitting that Saloth Sar might have been involved in Samouth’s betrayal. Pen Sovann, in his “Political Report” to the Fourth Party Congress in 1981, said definitely that in May 1962 Pol Pot’s “agents assassinated Tou Samouth and other party leaders” (Vickery, Kampuchea, p. 72). Another intriguing source, in an interview with Youk Chang on 20 February 2003,was Vann Rith, who was in charge of DK foreign commerce with Hong Kong and China, and who claimed to have been involved in both leftist politics and the Lon Nol army in the 1960s-70s, said that “After being arrested”, Tou Samouth was detained at Um Savut’s Banteay Sloek, to which Rith was attached, after which he was transferred to another location, where he was killed. Rith presumed this was on Lon Nol’s orders. “Um Savut warned Rith that he needed to be careful.” The late DC Cam interviews of DK survivors, such as Vann Rith, are not always reliable for detail, but there is much surviving contemporary (DK period) documentation of his importance in DK foreign commerce, and no apparent reason for him to lie about the fate of Tou Samouth. Attributing the immediate agency to Um Savuth lends credence, for the latter was famous during the 1970-75 war as one of Lon Nol’s most brutal officers. Another pre-revolutionary banker, called into financial service under DK, and whose survival seems miraculous, is Sar Kim/Keum Lamut, in April 1975 evacuated from Phnom Penh but brought back in 1976 to direct the bank for foreign trade, and who returned to banking after 1979. There seems to have been some rivalry between him and Vann Rith, for the latter, in the interview cited here, said that Sar Keum Lamut in fact knew nothing about Democratic Kampuchea finances.

[202] . I was in error here. The Pracheachon leader Non Suon reappeared briefly as a minister in the Democratic Kampuchea government after the end of the war, but in 1976 he was arrested and executed. His confessions show that there was lack of contact between the Pracheachon group and Pol Pot.

[203] . Of course, it was true that in the late 1960s Sihanouk’s policy of aiding the communist side in the Vietnam war in order to preserve peace within Cambodia was more useful to Viet Nam than the Pol Pot’s desire to overthrow Sihanouk.

[204] . On this subject see my review of Chanda’s Brother Enemy, below, pp. 221-240.

[205] . Now there is much information about Pol Pot in those years, when he indeed worked secretly for the party, while living openly as a teacher. See Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot; and Chandler, Brother Number One. A Political biography of Pol Pot, first edition, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 1993; second edition, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2000.

[206] . Milton Osborne, Politics and Power in Cambodia, p. 95, n. 5. [For more such misinformation see Osborne’s, and my review of it below, pp. 109-113].

[207] . The letter was dated 2 September 1979, in answer to Chanda’s report from Phnom Penh, 31 August 1979.

[208] . The Bangkok, and official, use of yuon continues. At the funeral of Princess Galyani in November 2008, Thai television used ‘yuon’ for a group of Vietnamese Buddhist monks who participated.

[209] .  PPP, Vol. 2 No. 9, 23 April-6 May 1993, p. 4; “Rainsy Bemoans Censorship, UN Cites Racism”. The prominent FUNCINPEC member, Mr. Sam Rainsy was refused permission to broadcast one of his election speeches because it was considered too racist in his attacks on Vietnamese. UN spokesman Eric Berman said “the text did not take into account the responsibilities involved in the freedom of expression”....”The freedom of expression also has responsibilities”. See further comment on continuing propaganda usage of yuon in Michael Vickery, “From Ionia to Viet Nam” PPP, vol. 12/14, July 4 - 17, 2003.

[210] . This was too early to make use of the terms ‘orientalism’, or ‘political correctness’, which had not yet become trendy.

[211] . Osborne, Before Kampuchea. My published review was in Asian Studies Association of Australia Review (1980), pp. 125-27 Osborne was both a diplomat and a prominent historian of Cambodia. Among his high quality historical writings are The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response (1859-1905), Cornell University Press, 1969; Power and Politics in Cambodia, Longman, 1973; and The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000.

[212] . Compare p. 149 on Nop Bophann and L’Ob­servateur with Osborne, Politics and Power in Cambodia, p.95, n. 5, and see above, p. 107. Among the sources cited by Osborne was Ith [It] Sarin, Sranoh Proleung Khmer [‘Regrets for the Khmer Soul’], Phnom Penh, 2517 [1974], no publisher indicated (English translation of title from Timothy Michael Carney, Communist Party Power in Kampuchea [Cambodia]): Documents and Discussion, Data Paper: Number 106, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, January 1977. The author was a teacher who joined the communist maquis in 1972, then redefected to the Khmer Republic government and wrote a memoir of his adventure. For a record of the fate of Poc Deuskomar, see above, and Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, Chapter 4, note 10 (p. 179).

[213] . One whom I then met and who fit this description was Siv Sichan, on whom see Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, p. 40.

[214] Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm.

[215] . The Chiang Mai conference was held on 11-13 August 1981. It resulted in the book, Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, edited by David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan, Monograph Series No. 25, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, New Haven, 1983. Shawcross’ contribution is entitled “Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster”, and my own is, “Democratic Kampuchea: Themes and Variations”, from which I developed Chapter 3 of Cambodia 1975-1982. For more detail on the refugee camps see my “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp System in Thailand”. 

[216] . On the Bangkok Embassy see John Pilger, “America’s Second War in Indochina, New Statesman, Aug 1, 1980.

[217] . For example, Michael Eiland, whom Pilger identified as one of the top men in the Bangkok embassy’s Cambodia operations in 1980 and who, in Sideshow, appears as operations officer for the ‘Daniel Boone’ secret missions into Cambodia in 1968. See Sideshow, Fontana Paperbacks edition, p. 25.

[218] . François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero, Penguin Books, 1977. [Since then Pochaud has made an almost 180 degree shift, finding now positive things to say about Democratic Kampuchea. See his “Social Change in the Vortex of Revolution”, in Karl D. Jaclson, ed., Cambodia 1975-1978 Rendevous with Death, Princeton 1989, pp. 151-178.]

[219] . Shawcross, “The End of Cambodia?”, p. 25; Pilger, Letters to the Editor, New Statesman, Aug 29, 1980.

[220] . Glyn Ford, MEP, Rapporteur, European Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia, British Labour Group, letter to the editor, “Rise of the extreme right cannot be ignored”, Guardian Weekly, 17 June 1990, p. 2.

[221] . Khmer Serei, “Free Khmer”, is a cover term for the anti-Communist political and military groups who opposed Sihanouk, supported Lon Nol, and after 1979 opposed both Pol Pot and the PRK.

[222] Chandler, A History, made the same errors as Shawcross, but, unlike Shawcross, never recognized he had been wrong. On pages 229-30 (third edition) he claims that by the middle of 1979 “a famine had broken out” because stored rice had been consumed, the 1979-1980 crop had not been planted, and of course much had been “appropriated by Vietnamese forces”. Inexplicably, “conditions stabilized in 1980 when the rice harvest doubled in size”, and Chandler seems not to have even noticed the contradiction in his treatment.

[223] . Published by the National Foreign Assessment Center, May 1980, based on research completed January 17, 1980. My analysis of it was later published as Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”, BCAS 14/4 (1982), pp. 45-54.

[224] . Lacouture, Survive le peuple cambodgien, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1978 p. 54; and compare Kenneth M. Quinn [US State Department, in 1995 appointed US Ambassador in Phnom Penh], “Political Change in Wartime: the Khmer Kraham Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970-74,” Naval War College Review, Spring 1976, based on research completed in 1974.

[225] . Guy Pauker, Frank H. Golay, Cynthia H. Enloe, Diversity and Development in Southeast Asia, The Council on Foreign Relations, McGraw-Hill, New York.

[226] . Chomsky and Herman, p. 153

[227] .  John Barron and Anthony Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land, Reader’s Digest Press 1977, pp. 203-206.

[228] .  CIA, “Kampuchea”, p. 7.

[229] .  Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide, Yale 1996 [an extreme critique of DK], pp. 48-49, suggested “a toll of 10,600 deaths in an evacuated population of two million”, with executions of officers, high-ranking officials and others who disobeyed orders raising the total to “around twenty thousand”.

[230] . CIA. “Kampuchea”, p. 5. The new information offered here and below derives from interviews with refugees in Thailand in the camps of Khao I Dang, Sakeo, Nong Chan, and Nong Samet between May and September 1980. In most details it also agrees with the information obtained by Ben Kiernan from entirely different groups of refugees and published in part in JCA, Vol. 10, 1/2, 1980.

[231] . Six million, estimated by a “senior UN official”, in Bangkok, FEER, Nov 14, 1980, p. 9; and 6.5 million, estimated by FAO, FEER, Dec 19, 1980, p. 37. [(Added 1998) It seems now, given the total population revealed by the recent  census (11.5 million) that these estimates too may have erred on the conservative side. For American projections in 1974-75 see George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1976, pp. 21-29, 53 and comment below, pp. 371-2]

[232] . CIA, “Kampuchea”, p. 12.

[233] . See below, comment on Shawcross’ November 1996 “Tragedy in Cambodia”; Steve Heder, “Why Pol Pot? Roots of the Cambodian Tragedy”, Indochina Issues 52, December 1984.

[234] . The source, Seng Chen-An, prepared a written report in French destined for western embassy officials, and given to me by another refugee, Ken Khun, who helped draft it. I never met the author himself. [(Added 2008) See more detail on Seng Chen-An in my Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 164-65, 205-08, 210, 217. Many years later, in 1996 or 1997, his great-nephew Lundi Seng, an activist in right-wing Cambodian emigré circles in California, contacted me by e-mail to accuse me of perverting his great-uncle’s testimony. I offered to send him a photocopy of his uncle’s report if he would supply a postal address, but he did not respond. Lundi Seng’s sister, Theary Seng is now, 2008, in Phnom Penh as “Executive Director” of the Center for Social Development, from which she issues regular statements published in PPP as paid advertisements. She also, like her brother, while claiming that I had distorted her great-uncle’s testimony, refused to acknowledge reception of a copy of his report which I sent to her.]

[235] . Stephen R. Heder, Kampuchean Occupation and Resistance, Asian Studies Monographs No. 027, Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, January 1980, based on research up to November 1979, p. 52. [(added later) Because Heder has objected to being described as “State Department researcher” I cite the following. In the Preface to the study in question here, Heder wrote “Funding was provided by the External Research Section of the US State Department, with the clear understanding that the author would be completely free to draw and express his own conclusions”. In another paper of November 1980, “Kampuchea October 1979-August 1980, The Democratic Kampuchea résistance, the Kampuchean Countryside, and the Sereikar”, unpublished, but widely distributed among those interested in Cambodia, Heder made a similar statement in the Preface, adding that the State Department funds were for June to August 1980, and that “In certain other periods funds were provided by Kyodo News Service and the Thailand National Commission for UNESCO with the same understanding”. Subsequently Heder has been extremely sensitive about any reference to this. In a letter of 20 September 1981 to the editor of BCAS concerning a proposed article he said, “I was funded part of the time by a State Department grant, but I was never, as is often gleefully alleged, ‘employed by the State Department’ (no more than someone with SSRC funding is ‘employed by SSRC’)....The results of my research in no way constitute ‘a State Department study’....nor do I need permission from the State Department....to make my research public”. He may have been referring to my remark in this article which has never been published, but was passed around among Cambodia scholars.].

[236] .  FEER, Nov 2, 1979, pp. 13-15; Nov 9, 1979, p. 41; Asiaweek, Oct 26, 1979, p. 16.

[237] . “Kampuchea Revives”, p. 84; Heder, Occupation, p. 31 (the peasants had fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables to trade); Heder, “From Pol Pot to Pen Sovann to the Villages,” International Conference on Indochina and Problems of security in Southeast Asia, Chulalongkorn University, June 1980 (based on research up to April 1980), p. 22; Asiaweek, April 6, 1979, p. 16 (the countryside won’t starve, there are vegetables, tapioca, fish, fruit).

[238] . Heder, op. cit., and “Kampuchea October 1979-August 1980”, mimeographed, 115 pp., Bangkok, November 1980. [(added later) See further analysis in Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 194-99, 212-26, 248-51]

[239] . Heder, Ibid., pp. 22-29, 31,37; and Heder, “Kampuchea 1979- 1980”, pp. 91-92.

[240] . Heder, “From Pol Pot”, pp. 38-39; and “Kampuchea 1979-1980”, p. 104.

[241] . Heder, “From Pol Pot”, p. 21; and “Kampuchea 1979-1980”, pp. 104-108.

[242] . Shawcross, “Kampuchea Revives”; Barry Wain, Asian Wall Street Journal, Dec 30, 1980; Richard M. Harley, “Christian Science Monitor Service”, in Honolulu Advertiser, Jan 31, 1981; FAO, Office for Special Relief Operations, “Kampuchea, Report of the FAO Food Assessment Mission”, Rome, November 1980.

[243] . Sylvana Foa, UPI, Bangkok, May 8, 1981, in The Weekend Australian, May 9-10. [(added 2007) Foa, like Shawcross, is a journalist who switched jackets. In Phnom Penh, during the 1970-75 war, she was considered a gadfly of the Americans and Lon Nol regime, but after 1979, hostile to the PRK and to the Vietnamese, she in fact moved into the US camp. The move paid off. She moved steadily upward into important positions in UPI, UNHCR, the World Food Program and the UN, where in 1996 she became spokeswoman for the Secretary-General. See www. scienceblog.com, 17 November 1995, SG/A/614 BIO/2997]

[244] . My information on that event, particularly on ‘enticement’, comes from interviews with survivors among the refugees in Khao I Dang, (and in later years from survivors who returned to Phnom Penh). See also FEER, Aug 3 and 17, 1979, and Asiaweek, June 22, 1979.

[245] . FEER, Sept 21 and 28, and Nov 9, 1979.

[246] .  FEER, Nov 9, 1979, p. 29, and conversations with foreign relief personnel present at the time.

[247] . FEER, Nov 2, 1979, pp. 12-13.

[248] . The precise tracing of the border on the ground in that area is not known with any precision, and the locations of the camps must be distinguished from the villages of the same names, all of which are on the Thai side. Among the camps Nong Samet stands the best chance of being on Thai territory, while Nong Chan and Non Mak Mun, occupied by the Vietnamese in the ‘incursion’ of June 1980, might well be on the Cambodian side.  Interestingly, Thai sources, both official and journalistic, except for the excitement following the ‘incursion’, have been exceedingly circumspect when discussing the location of the camps in relation to the border. [See Michael Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”.]

[249] .  Shawcross, “The End of Cambodia?”, p. 25; FEER, Nov 9, 1979, p.42

[250] . FEER, Nov 16, 1979, p. 25; Asiaweek, Nov 30, 1979, p.16; FEER, Dec 7, 1979, pp. 5, 14; Shawcross, “The End of Cambodia?”, pp. 25,29.

[251] .  The UNHCR statistics are found in an appendix to Milton E. Osborne, “The Kampuchea Refugee Situation; a Survey and Commentary”, Bangkok 1980. Other details are from interviews with both refugees and foreign aid personnel present at the time.

[252] . FEER, Dec 28, 1979, pp. 10-11, reported that western observers traveling around Cambodia could not see the picture of general starvation which had been reported; and this was confirmed later by Shawcross in “Kampuchea Revives”.

[253] .  The Nation Review, Bangkok, Sept 12, 1980, p.12. One baht = US $.05.

[254] . Information on Voice of America broadcasts from refugees who claimed to have been influenced by them. John Pilger, in his, “America’s Second War in Indochina”, also emphasized the magnet effect of Khao I Dang.

[255] . Chandler, Brother Number One, first edition, p. 125, second edition, p. 119. My attention was directed to Chandler’s carelessness on this point by Louis Paulsen, review of Chandler’s Brother Number One, www.marxmail.org/archives/june98/cambodia.htm; Ong Thong Hoeung, J’ai cru aux Khmers rouges, Paris, Buchet/Chastel, 2003, pp. 185-190. On Thiounn  Thioeun and his brothers see above note 196. There are two published memoirs in Khmer by doctors who were put to work as such after April 1975 until 1977 and who survived until the present, My Samedi, Ban ros’ ruom comnaek thvoe oy ros’/Survivre pour faire vivre, Phnom Penh, no publisher indicated, 2000; and Hun Chhunly, Chivit kru pet mneak knong robop khmer krohom/The life of a physician under the khmer rouge regime, Phnom Penh, Indradevi Publishing, 2006. Neither has been translated, although French and English translations were promised at the time of publication. The lack of interest in their testimony is probably because their stories are not horrible enough.

[256] . After 1980, with the rapid decline in KID population to less than 40,000 in 1982, conditions still further improved.

[257] .  The survey report, dated March 30, 1981, is “Kampuchean Refugees in Thailand, Attitudes Towards Voluntary Repatriation”, by Milton E. Osborne, Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of International Relations, Australian National University, whom I wish to thank for providing me with a copy.

[258] . FEER, May 1, 1981, pp. 22-23.

[259] . Chandler, Tragedy, p. 363, note 118, citing U.S. Embassy Phnom Penh’s 5612, March 29, 1975. See more on this below, p. 221

[260] . See below, pp. 189-204.

[261] . Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and its Aftermath, pp. 241-2; “The Third Indochina War” NYRB 6 April 1978.

[262] . Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot; and Vickery, Cambodia, chapter 5.

[263] . Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, pp. 149, 138.

[264] . Although this was true in 1979, it was no longer accurate at the time I wrote, in 1984. After the arrest and exile of Pen Sovann in 1981 and the death of Chan Si in 1984, the thin stratum at the top were former DK personnel who broke with Pol Pot in 1977-78 (Hun Sen, Heng Samrin, Chea Sim) or who had remained estranged from the central DK authorities in outlying regions since before 1975 (Say Phoutang, Tea Banh, Bou Tang). It is accurate to say, however, that in the East Zone the influence of the older communist group remained stronger.

[265] . “An Exchange on Cambodia”, letters by Nayan Chanda, Ben Kiernan, and Shawcross, NYRB, 17 September, 1984.

[266] . On the trip to Phnom Penh I was accompanied by Chantou Boua, David Chandler, Ben Kiernan and Serge Thion, and traveled to Battambang and Angkor with Thion and David French of Church World Service, who, because of his work, was able to travel rather freely in his own vehicle even at that early date.

[267] . An abbreviated version was published in Vietnam Today (Canberra), Number 19 (November Quarter 1981), p. 11. ANU is the Australian National University in Canberra where I was employed from 1979 to 1982, and Monash University, Chandler’s and Kiernan’s location at the time, is near Melbourne. Serge Thion was based in an institution under the University of Paris.

[268] . On this see also Norman Lewis, Dragon Apparent, London, Eland, 1982 [1951], “Preface to 1982 Edition”, p. 2.

[269] . This was Nayan Chanda in FEER  8 December 1978. See my letter on this above, p. 2. [(added 1997) Since I wrote this in 1981 three very productive academics have appeared on the Lao studies scene, demonstrating that some Westerners could resist succumbing to the stereotype. All, Grant Evans, Geoffrey Gunn, and Martin Stuart-Fox, have demonstrated their ability to distinguish between cold stone and warm flesh, and all, interestingly, are Australians [(added 1999 I am now aware of even more Western Lao specialists. Perhaps the changes in Lao society since 1975 do not encourage the traditional adaptations)].  

[270] . See his account of this in Serge Thion, Chapter 1, “Cambodia 1972: Within the Khmer Rouge”, pp. 1-19, Watching Cambodia, Bangkok, White Lotus, 1993.

[271] . See Graham Greene, The Quiet American. [Now (2006), for several years, those old hotel names have been restored].

[272] . This is an observation made from personal experience traveling in Europe in 1950-51.

[273] . For more on General Chana Samudvanija, and the material he provided us, see Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 60, 100. Among the Chana material were photographs of US military officers with the So’n Ngoc Thanh Issarak guerillas in Thailand in the 1950s.

[274] . In the real old days, before the modern highway was built, the normal route was by river steamer up the Mekong from Saigon to Phnom Penh, and then all the way to Angkor across the Tonle Sap by boat, taking  three days, including a 24-hour stop in Phnom Penh. See J. Commaille, Guide aux ruines d’Angkor, Paris, Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1912, pp. 1-4.

[275] . Evidence to support this assertion has accumulated since 1981 until one European research specialist is of the opinion that no libraries in Phnom Penh suffered damage before 1979. See Olivier de Bernon, “À propos du retour des bakous dans le palais royal de Phnom Penh”, in École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Études thématiques 6, Renouveaux religieux en Asie, Textes réunis par Catherine Clémentin-Ojha, Paris, 1997, p. 44, note 33. In particular, the tale of the National Library turned into a pigpen has been revealed as untrue. See also below, note 362.

[276] . For detailed treatment of these historical details see Vickery, “Looking Back”; Kiernan, How Pol Pot; Chandler, Tragedy.  [It is now, 2008, known that Ieng Sary was not so important as believed by foreign observers in the 1980s. He was never ‘Number 2’, a position held by Nuon Chea.]

[277] . When this was first published Pen Sovann was then Prime Minister and First Secretary of the Party, as well as Army chief. At the end of 1981 he was suddenly removed and sent to Viet Nam where he remained under arrest until 1990. He returned to Cambodia in 1992, but had no political role until the 1998 election for which he formed a political party, but without electoral success. Mat Ly, and his father, were among the Cham who supported the communist revolution from before 1975.

[278] . Research revealing this was by Stephen Heder in interviews on the Thai-Cambodian border, published in his Kampuchean Occupation and Resistance.

[279] . To keep one detail in perspective, it should be noted that pre-war Cambodia at the end of the 1960s had around 500 medical doctors. According to a list being prepared by Cambodian doctors in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in the summer of 1980, around half were alive and outside the country in early 1980, most having left before the communist victory in 1975. If it is true, as Bannister and Johnson have written, that “during the Khmer Rouge period … the health and survival chances of the Cambodian people were reduced to a primitive level devoid of modern medical inputs”, this was not just the fault of the Khmer Rouge. Most backwoods Cambodians had always lived at a “primitive level devoid of modern medical inputs”, and by 1975 half of the doctors in the country had bugged out. It is not true that the medical deficiency was because, as Bannister and Johnson wrote, “the Pol Pot regime intentionally killed the doctors and pharmacists, laid waste the hospitals and clinics…”. See Judith Bannister and E. Paige Johnson, “After the Nightmare: the Population of Cambodia”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, edited by Ben Kiernan, New Haven, Yale, 1993, pp. 65-140 (p. 102).

[280] . In writing his History of Cambodia, Chandler seems to have allowed ideology (see pp. 575 ff. below) to obscure this 1981 experience, in the beginning of the PRK. In his fourth edition, p. 284, he writes that it was “children of PRK Cadres” who “were favored for scholarships to study overseas”.

[281] .Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, Pelican, 1968, pp. 65, 272, 895.

[282] . The conference was held in New York on 13-17 July, 1981. See Patrick Raszelenberg and Peter Schier, The Cambodia Conflict: Search for a Settlement, 1979-1991-An Analytical Chronology, Hamburg, Institute for Asian Affairs, 1995, pp. 42-44.

[283] . See Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, pp. 106-108, 111-113.

[284] When an internationally-supervised election was finally held in 1993, the international military component was over 20,000, about the same as the Vietnamese military in the last two years before their withdrawal, and they were indeed unable to disarm the Cambodian factions, in particular the Khmer Rouge.

[285] . For the events of 1951-1955 see Vickery, “Looking Back”; Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot; and Chandler, Tragedy .

[286] . As an essay in futurology, this piece, written in 1981, was not too bad. Like most other observers, I was wrong about the potential popularity of the Son Sann faction, which in the 1993 election split into BLDP which won 10 seats, and LDP, which won none; a couple of other parties proved weaker than I, and other observers, had expected; and I misjudged the strength of Sihanouk’s appeal; but was right about the problems of an indecisive result. See below, pp. 448-460,  and Cambodia: a Political Survey.

[287] During the summer of 1980 I worked for about three months for the International Refugee Committee supervising the schools which they supported in the Cambodian refugee camps, mainly in Khao-I-Dang, with its 150,000 population then the second-largest Khmer agglomeration in the world. See my “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp System in Thailand”.

[288] . See Kiernan’s page 189, note 30 and associated text.

[289] A version of this article was published in Vietnam Today (Canberra), Number 19 (November Quarter 1981), pp. 9-11.

[290] . This was the conference in Chiang Mai 11-13 August 1981 and to which reference has been made above. On that occasion General Chana gave a large volume of documents relating to Thai intrigues on the Cambodian border to David Chandler and Ben Kiernan. The documents have been placed in the library of Monash University, and include photographs of American officers with Cambodian dissident figures.

[291] . Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”; the CIA report was “Kampuchea: a Demographic Catastrophe”, National Foreign Assessment Center, May 1980.

[292] . “Democratic Kampuchea, Themes and Variations”, in Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and its Aftermath, pp. 99-135; “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”. The very late (1987) publication of this book meant that much of my information about the refugee camps, new in 1982, had been superseded.

[293] . From the end of the 18th century Cambodia collapsed into factions relying on Thai or Vietnamese support to further their aims; then King Ang Duang, who presided over a buffer state under joint Thai-Vietnamese suzerainty, wanted French intervention even before the latter were ready for it; until 1953 Sihanouk, among Cambodian nationalists, had a constant credibility problem establishing his credentials as a fighter for independence; and the ‘Sihanoukist system’, after 1955, was unviable without dependence on foreign economic support for Cambodia and foreign political intervention in Southeast  Asia. Democratic Kampuchea was of course the ‘Pol Pot Regime’.

[294] . See pp. 200, 202 in the published version of Carney’s conference paper, “The Heng Samrin Armed Forces and the Military Balance in Cambodia”, in Ablin & Hood, editors, The Cambodian Agony, pp. 180-212. For General Sayud’s remarks see Nation Review (newspaper, Bangkok), 7 December 1982, quoted in BBC, “Summary of World Broadcasts”, FE/7204/A3/2, 9 December 1982. 

[295] . This note has been entirely rewritten to bring the bibliographic details up to date. The book is Cambodia 1975-1982. The Princeton conference paper is “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp System in Thailand”, subsequently published in Ablin & Hood, The Cambodian Agony.

[296] . See Norman Peagam, FEER, 11 February 1977, pp. 8-10; and FEER 4 March 1977, pp. 9-10. Admittedly his report on that incident was not cited by the Thai authorities as the reason for his expulsion, but it is nevertheless reasonable to infer a connection. The most thorough treatment of the border incident is in ‘Larry Palmer’ [Stephen Heder], “Thailand’s Kampuchea Incidents”, News From Kampuchea, I, 4 (Oct. 1977), 1-31.

[297] . Nation Review (Bangkok), 7 December 1982, quoted in BBC, “Summary of World Broadcasts”, FE/7204/A3/2, 9 December 1982.

[298] . Quotations respectively from Bangkok Post, 4 November 1982, and Nation Review, 7 December 1982.

[299] . Major General Somkid Changpayuha, Bangkok Post, 12 July 1982, p.2.

[300] .  Bangkok Post, 4 November 1982.

[301] . Washington Post, 5 July 1980; quoted in Hans H. Indorf and Astri Suhrke, “Indochina: the Nemesis of ASEAN?”, Southeast Asian Affairs 1981 (Singapore), p. 67. For the 1980 incursion see above, Mak Mun, pp. 173, below, p. 248.

[302] . A coalition in which the dominant party was the leadership of former Democratic Kampuchea was called ‘anti-communist’. Or, perhaps Ambassador Kasemsri held views similar to those which I put forth two years later in chapter 5 of Cambodia 1975-1982, arguing that DK policies were not Marxist -Leninist.

[303] . Although ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ did not become official until 1976, I am using it here for the entire period 17 April 1975 to the end of the `Pol Pot Regime’ in January 1979.

[304] . Vickery, “Looking Back “. See Nation Review and Bangkok Post, 27 November 1982, p.1; Asian Wall Street Journal, 29 November 1982, p.1; Bangkok Post, 11 December 1982, p.3.

[305] . See the well-balanced report by Alan Dawson and Supradit Kanwanich in Bangkok Post, 8 July 1982, p.7.

[306] . FEER 5 November, p. 13.

[307] . FEER 17 March 1983, pp. 34-35.

[308] . At Princeton, Becker appeared on Panel I, with a presentation entitled, “Current Political History in Perspective”.

[309] . This was precisely what happened when urban property was privatized and given free to occupants in 1988-89.

[310] . In Lon Nol’s view of ‘war of religion’, about which he had a series of pamphlets published, the Vietnamese were identified with the Thmil (Tamil), the enemies of the true faith in old Sinhalese lore, and a term which has passed into Thai and Khmer in the sense of religious foe.

[311] . I shot from the hip on this, and was wrong, because this Wat, located outside the Phnom Penh city limits, was not on a list of Phnom Penh Wats in my possession at the time. On a later trip I visited it along with the same Foreign Ministry guide who had accompanied Becker. See my correction and apology in Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, note 13 to chapter 10, p. 197. It is interesting that Becker did not correct me in her hostile review of my Cambodia 1975-1982, published in Problems of Communism (May-June 1985), indicating she did not know whether she was correct or mistaken (see below, pp. 211-216).

[312] . The Nazi in question was Klaus Barbie, saved after 1945 and employed by the US government in Bolivia until 1983. See Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division: 1983; and Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press: 1985). For more on this subject see Edward S. Herman, “Holocaust Doers and Deniers”, Z Magazine, November 1993, pp. 7-10.

[313] . Or, in refugee communities in western cities, such as Toronto, as seen in Bill Schiller and Dave Walker, “Khmer Rouge Killers Find Refuge in Canada”, The Sunday Star (Toronto), 28 February 1988.

[314] . Martin Walker, “Hot mettle man, Ben Bradlee – life’s been awfully good”, The Guardian, reproduced in New Sunday Times (Kuala Lumpur), Sunday Style, 28 January 1996, pp. 2-3.

[315] . Letter from Philip Bowring, 25 April 1983.

[316] . The KPNLF letter was published in FEER, 14 April 1983, pp. 6-7. Among the tripartite coalition parties the KPNLF in particular was well supplied with personable multi-lingual young officials who were very effective with impressionable foreign visitors.

[317] . Letter from Derek Davies, 11 May 1983. As Bowring noted in his obituary of Davies, “He could give out criticism but was less than ready to absorb it”.  The Review was bought by Dow Jones in 1987. Davies was kicked upstairs to a less active post where he amused himself for several years by pasting together silly pictures and bad ethnic jokes in a column called ‘Traveler’s Tales’ (see above, p. 108, ‘Plain of Big Cunt’), and Bowring became editor. The final move in the Review’s decline was Bowring’s replacement as editor in 1992 by an American right-wing ideologue, L. Gordon Crovitz (see his article entitled, “Rule of Law”, “Hayek’s Road From Serfdom for Legal U-Turn”, about the work of the recently deceased Friedrich Hayek, in Asian Wall Street Journal, 10-11 April 1992). The Review itself “a magazine once notorious for its feisty independence was submerged in Dow Jones, its editorial line a carbon copy of the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial pages” (see The Correspondent, the on-line publication of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong,  October-November 2002, “Cover Story - Derek Davies - 1931-2002”).

[318] . Unpublished article, prepared for FEER and submitted 5 May 1983.

[319] . FEER, 28 March 1975, pp. 11-12; 1 August 1975, p. 22; 5 September 1975, p. 22; 24 October 1975, pp. 8-10; 7 May 1976, pp. 22-23; 25 June 1976, p. 26; above, pp. 98-108.

[320] . William Shawcross, “Kampuchea Revives on Food, Aid, and Capitalism”, The Bulletin [Australia], 24 March 1981; and “Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster” in Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and its Aftermath, 230-258.

[321] . Kiernan and Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942-1981, Part 3; Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea, CIA to the Rescue”. [Later publications were Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: Themes and Variations” in Chandler and Kiernan; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, 1984].

[322] . My letter was sent on 6 April and was published in The Age, 14 April 1983, p.12, as “Kampuchea’s Border Brutality”, with deletion of the first paragraph.

[323] . My critique of Becker’s articles is presented above, pp. 189, ff. Michael Barnard was one of the most insistent far right political writers on The Age. His article on 15 March 1983 was “Vietnam a vital text for Labor”, which had just won the Australian parliamentary election and which, with Minister for Foreign Affairs Bill Hayden had a conciliatory policy toward Viet Nam and Cambodia.

[324] . Becker, “Cambodian Tragedy”, Problems of Communism, May-June 1985, pp. 70-73.

[325] . Becker’s sympathy for leftist liberation wars is seen in her pre-1975 reportage from Phnom Penh (Elizabeth Becker, Washington Post 10 March 1974, “Who are the Khmer Rouge’”, reprinted in Indochina Today, March 1974), and in the trip to DK in December 1978 with Richard Dudman and Malcolm Caldwell. On So’n Ngoc Thanh see Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 253-56, 289.

[326] . See Times Education Supplement, 16 November 1984.

[327] . See my “Democratic Kampuchea – CIA to the Rescue”.

[328] . See Martin Stuart-Fox and Bunheang Ung, The Murderous Revolution, Chippendale, Australia, 1985.

[329] . Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 194-199, 212-226, 248-251.

[330] . Barron and Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land; on Shawcross see passim.,  above and below.

[331] . Becker, together with Richard Dudman and Malcom Caldwell, traveled in Democratic Kampuchea in December 1978. This was the occasion on which Caldwell was murdered.

[332] . This was corrected in my Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, note 13 to chapter 10, p. 197; and see note 311 above.

[333] . I remained in Australia until 1988, then returned to Penang, Malaysia until 1998, when I moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, until the present, but during 1999-2002 taught Cambodian history, in Khmer, in the Archaeological Faculty of the Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh.

[334] . Those two articles appeared (1) “The Reign of Sūryavarman I and Royal Factionalism at Angkor”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1985, 226-244; and (2) “Some Remarks on Early State Formation in Cambodia”, in South­east Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, edited by David G. Marr and A.C. Milner, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1986, pp. 95-115. A later publication on early Cambodian history was a book, Society, Economics and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries. Tokyo. The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for UNESCO, The Toyo Bunko, 1998.

[335] . ASIEN, Nr. 28 (July 1988), pp. 118-121. The survey article was “Cambodia 1988”, ASIEN (German Association for Asian Studies, Hamburg), Nr. 28, July 1988, pp. 1-19. Citations from Becker and page number references are from the first edition, and some have been changed in the second. Footnotes inserted here were not in the original.

[336] . Becker, pp. 52-53, should have cited Vickery, “Looking Back”; Becker, pp. 54-55 also depends both on ibid. and on Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot; Becker p. 74, “...Sar joined others in trying to push the Democrats toward a bold, leftist position...”, needs reference to Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 198-99; Becker p. 82, Saloth Sar “liaison between the Pracheachon Party and the Democratic Party”, and “helping write statutes ...for the Pracheachon”, etc., seems a direct steal from Vickery, Cambodia, p. 199. If not, it needs clear citation from some other source; and as David Chandler indicated in his revue of Becker (“Requiem for the 1970s: Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over”, Indo-China Issues, 1986), on pp. 109, 134, 250, 254 (first edition) she “appears to be paraphrasing” the work of Vickery. There Chandler also criticized Becker for ‘quoting’ from Khmer-language sources which she could not read. Later, as Chandler’s position moved toward what is treated in these pages as the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, he found Becker’s book, along with Etcheson’s Rise and Demise, which Becker (above, p. 212) found to be a “flawed job” and Ponchaud’s Year Zero (see Vickery, Cambodia, chapter 2), to be one of “the best general accounts of the Khmer Rouge period”, a “persuasive analysis”, and the only one among the books on Democratic Kampuchea “which makes extended use of the S-21 archive” (David Chandler, Voices from S-21, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2000, pp. 161, 177; and Brother, first edition, p. 238, second edition, p. 246.)

[337] . Ith [It] Sarin, Sranoh Proleung Khmer [‘Regrets for the Khmer Soul’], p. 73; Becker, p. 269, Chanda, p. 82. Thiounn Mum in Becker, p. 301,

[338] . This was in Becker’s first edition. By the time of the second edition her views of post-1979 Cambodia had changed and the dishonest treatment of ‘Vietnamization’ was removed. See the very different “Epilogues” in the two editions.

[339] . Quinn’s reputation among academics in based on, Kenneth M. Quinn, “Political Change in Wartime: the Khmer Kraham Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970-74,” Naval War College Review, Spring 1976, based on research completed in 1974. When I first wrote this in 1988 he was number 2 in the US embassy in Manila. In December 1995 Quinn was named US Ambassador to Cambodia.

[340] . Hearing, Committee on Foreign Affairs, subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, 98^th Congress, first session on H.Con.Res.176, 15/9, 6 and 18/10, 1983, printed 1983.

[341] . Footnotes added later. After I had written the review which follows here, I received an invitation from Marvin Gettleman to do a review of Chanda for Science and Society, but even after cutting my text in half it was too long for that journal, and I did not wish to cut it further.

[342] . Within a few years of Chanda’s writing, this assessment, like most right-wing American views of the impossibility of change in Communist systems, was proven wrong. See Thomas Engelbert and Christopher E. Goscha, Falling Out of Touch: A Study on Vietnamese Communist Policy Towards an Emerging Cambodian Communist Movement, 1930-1975, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, Australia, 1995. A major publishing defect in this excellent study is the total lack of attention to correct Vietnamese orthography (no diacritics) in the numerous citations in that language. Given the facilities of modern word-processing, that is now inexcusable in scholarly publications. One of the authors, Goscha, who is fluent in Vietnamese, told me that this was forced on them by their publisher, who did not wish to make the small extra effort to do a good job.

[343] . See my comments on this in Cambodia a Political Survey, Phnom Penh, Funan Press, 2007, pp, 8-9.

[344] . Chanda was in Washington 1984-1989, and was first listed as Washington correspondent for FEER in its issue of 16 February 1984.

[345] . Chanda pp. 237-9; Evans and Rowley, (first edition), pp. 50-3, (second edition), pp. 48-50.

[346] . Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, pp. 89-90, cites Chanda, and includes more details of Phim’s appearance, apparently from an interview with Heng Samrin.

[347] . As noted below at the end of this review, this is redolent of a certain type of Washington script writing.

[348] . One may reasonably surmise that this was influenced by Chanda’s five years, 1984-1989, in Washington,

[349] .  Evans and Rowley, pp. 2-6; and see other references to this above and below.

[350] Evans and Rowley, pp. 3-4; from Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, London 1967, pp. 486-87.

[351]   The most detailed history of the 17th century is Mak Phoeun, Histoire du Cambodge de la fin du XVIe siècle au début du XVIIIe, Paris, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1995, See pp. 251, 296-7, and my review in BEFEO 83 (1996), pp. 405-15.

[352] Quotation in Evans and Rowley, p. 4.

[353] . See above, page 16 text with notes 30-31.

[354] . Vickery, “Looking Back “; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, Chapter 1; Chandler, Tragedy.

[355] . For another interpretation see above, p. 47, text with note 102.

[356] . See discussion below, pp. 283-286.

[357] . For example, soon after the 1973 ousting of their military dictators, US ambassador Leonard Unger chided the Thai for being too concerned with democracy, when they should be worrying about the dangers of communism.

[358] Evans and Rowley, p. 38.

[359] On MIAs see H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, New York, Lawrence Hill Books, 1992.

[360] . Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea – CIA to the Res­cue”.

[361] . The photograph was taken by Hedda Eckerwald who gave me a copy.

[362] . This information is from a private source who had good State Department contacts and whom I trust on this point.

[363]. Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 173-74, 234. One of the anti-Vietnamese lines concerned damage in the National Library, about which an accurate statement is in a letter to the PPP, 4/4, 24 Feb-9 March, 1995, p. 8, by George Smith, Consulting Fellow to the National Library. When writing Cambodia 1975-1982 my information about the library, pp. 173, 234, was incomplete, and only in 1993 did I learn in a chance encounter with one of the first persons assigned to clean up the library in 1979 that during the DK period the main building had been used as a storeroom for dishes (not a pig pen as colorful propaganda alleged), while the books were removed to the archive building behind the main library. See also above, note 275. Another probable canard, devised for an anti-Vietnamese implication, is in Chandler, Tragedy, p. 91, “the copies of [the “relatively free” 1950s newspapers] held in Cambodia’s National Library were pulped and recycled in 1979”, referred in footnote 13 to Justin Corfield, who “has interviewed a Cambodian hired by the Vietnamese [really Vietnamese or PRK Khmer, whom their local enemies like to call ‘Vietnamese’?] in 1979 to assist with the pulping”. This source is unreliable. Remember all the ‘eyewitness’ stories about what DK was supposed to have done to the library. It is necessary to know when and where Corfield interviewed the person, and to hear his description of conditions in the library when he and the ‘Vietnamese’ entered it in 1979, and if there was pulping was it because the newspapers were already destroyed by storage in poor conditions, or was it simply destruction. In fact I doubt the story. From my acquaintances who were involved with cleaning up official buildings in Phnom Penh in 1979, including the library, Vietnamese were not involved, except in reorganizing the books after the cleanup. Did Corfield’s informant mean by ‘Vietnamese’ officials of the PRK? And it is clear that many documents disappeared through carelessness and theft because of lack of supervision. In the early 1979 anarchy ordinary people stole newspapers for personal use in wrapping market goods, but when in the late 1980s the library was reorganized, it was found that large quantities of the old collections had been preserved. Chandler just tries to make the post-1979 government look bad, ‘suppressing information’. It will not work in this case, because most of the newspapers in question would have been supportive of the way the post-1979 PRK wished to write history (See a list of the most important in Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 179-80). Short, Pol Pot, p. 284, footnote, avoiding any political inference, repeats the canard from Chandler, without, however, sourcing it, and with a purportedly rational explanation, “a stopgap measure at a time of acute shortage of paper”. The quantity of newsprint involved, and even less the quantity really found to be missing, would not have served that purpose usefully. Another remark in Chandler’s note 13 is even more peculiar, “See U.S. Embassy Phnom Penh’s 328, March 13, 1957 [sic!], on pulping”, which no one has claimed to have occurred until 1979.

     With respect to Corfield, in order to take this seriously, one would have to know when Corfield met his source, and who the source was. It is not safe now, nor was it in the 1990s, to accept what everyone said about what they saw or did in 1979 and the early 80s. Many have adjusted their personal histories to fit current tendencies and prejudices. Uncritical use of such sourcing is characteristic of Chandler’s Tragedy and Evan Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge Inside the Politics of Nation Building, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2003, on which see Vickery, “Wrong on Gottesman” [review by Luke Hunt, PPP 13/27, Dec 31, 2004-Jan 13, 2005],  PPP 14/2, Jan 28-Feb 10, 2005.

[364] . ‘Khmer Issarak’, or ‘Free Khmer’ refers to those armed groups, many local, ad hoc, and of very diverse political tendencies, who took up arms against the French in 1945, or even earlier before the end of World War II. Most students of the period distinguish them from those who fought along with the Vietnamese to achieve independence plus socialist revolution, and who pursued the same goals as Cambodian units after 1951, although there was always some overlap between Issarak and communists. Heder’s insistence on using ‘Khmer Issarak’ for the Cambodian communists who worked together with the Vietnamese is an obfuscation in order to support the Pol Pot line that there was no Cambodian communist party until his group organized one in 1960. The best description of Issaraks and early Cambodian communists is in Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot.

[365] . Vickery, Cambodia, p. 291; and Stewart E. Fraser, “Vietnam’s Struggles with Exploding Population”, Indochina Issues 57, May 1985, cited by Chanda, p. 453, n. 17.

[366] . Indochina Report is an allegedly private newsletter devoted to anticommunist writing, much of it anonymous, or by well-known reactionaries. Chanda cited its first pre-publication issue of October 1984, “The Vietnamisation of Kampuchea: A New Model of Colonialism”, anonymous. Attentive observers believe it was set up and financed by the Singapore government, and its mode of presentation is designed to mislead the public that it is part of the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, a genuine academic body. The propaganda line cited here is based on the fantasy, shared by most Cambodians, of the country’s great natural wealth. In fact its agricultural land is among the poorest, and produces little surplus. Most of the Vietnamese who have settled in Cambodia since 1979 went to the towns as skilled workers, not into agriculture. On Indochina Report see further below, nn. 500, 518.

[367] Details of the gradual withdrawal are in Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 20-30.5

[368] . See Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”.

[369] . Compare Chanda, above, note 346, and text. From Henze’s The Plot to Kill the Pope, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985, quoted in Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, New York, Sheridan Square Publications, Inc., 1986, p. 147. For Henze’s style, see also his Ethiopian Journeys: Travels in Ethiopia, 1969-72, Benn, 1977.      

[370] . “Snapping at the heels of the watchdog”, Editorial, The Nation, 19 February 1999, p. A4.

[371] . As Myra MacPherson wrote in All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, Scribner, 2006, Stone told her, “You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk”; and, says MacPherson, he “gave me some terse advice: Don’t go to briefings. Don’t have lunch with people in power”; the private dinner, the special briefing, are all devices for “managing” the news, as are the special organizations of privileged citizens gathered in by State and Defense Departments for those sessions at which highly confidential (and one-sided) information is ladled out to a flattered ‘elite’.

[372]. Nayan Chanda, FEER 24 September 1987, p. 14. At the Australian Asian Studies Conference in February 1988, McCoy confirmed for me what he had said on television, and also said that there did not seem to be any interest in the media to report that side of the story. On 22 December 1989, after the second Honasan affair (see John McBeth, “Gunning for Cory”, FEER 14 December 1989, pp. 12-14), I wrote to Philip Bowring at FEER suggesting that he invite McCoy to do a “5th Column” piece on the Honasan RAM group.

[373] . James Clad “US smoulders over ‘pay up or get out’ tactics: Patience wears thin” FEER, “deputy US chief of mission Kenneth Quinn”, quoted as saying that the US bases would be of no more use if ships carrying nuclear weapons were excluded.

[374]. Kenneth Michael Quinn, “Political Change in Wartime: the Khmer Kraham Revolution in Southern Cambodia”, US Naval War College Review, Spring 1976.

[375] . Later, in the 1990s, as ambassador in Cambodia, Quinn redeemed himself in that country by refusing to support the machinations of the anti-Vietnamese right-wing Sam Rainsy, supported by the International Republican Institute and other US reactionaries, against the legitimate Cambodian government, a position which, I have heard, damaged his subsequent career.

[376] . Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia, p. 15 and note 37, p. 217, citing Chanda, “Civil War in Cambodia?”, Foreign Policy no. 76, Fall 1989, p. 38. See also Ben Kiernan, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: the Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, New Haven, Yale, 1993, p.253, n.58.

[377] . Nate Thayer, “A Khmer Ruse”, FEER, 7 March 1991, pp. 25-26. On another occasion, at the Foreign Correspondents’ Association in Bangkok, Thayer has been reported as saying that “the truth is the Khmer Rouge are hated more in this room than in Cambodia” (Jari Lindholm, in Sanomalehtimies/Journalisten [‘The Journalist’], (Helsinki), 17 January 1991, p. 14, sent to me by Hannu Reime of Finnish Radio. See also below, pp 404-405.

[378] . One such publication was “Recent Propaganda on Kampuchea”, published in Vietnam Today (Canberra), No.25, May 1983. It combined the letter to The Age on “Kampuchea’s Border Brutality” (above, text with n,321), some of my critique of  Elizabeth Becker (above, pp. 189, ff.), the letter to FEER on Soviet aid to Cambodia (, p. 194), and the letters to The Australian about Adelia Bernard (below, pp. 246, ff.). The following is another version of the same material. 

[379] . The annual votes on Cambodia in the UN in the 1980s were designed to discredit the Phnom Penh government and Vietnam, and to implicitly support the tripartite coalition of Democratic Kampuchea (‘Khmer Rouge’), FUNCINPEC royalists, and KPNLF on the Thai border. After the Australian Labor Party election victory in 1983, Foreign Minister Bill Hayden apparently wished to use Australian influence to change the international hostility to Vietnam and Cambodia.

[380] . Conversation with Dr. Amos Townsend in Bangkok, 17 August 1982. For some details of the 1980 incident see my “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp System in Thailand”. [(Added in 1987) It would seem that Nguyen Quan was being set up to become another Jan Sejna, the Czechoslovak Stalinist general rescued by the CIA from prosecution by the Dubcek government in 1968. Sejna has repaid the favor by allowing himself to be used as witness to Czech, and Soviet, involvement in any matter which is brought forth for Cold War propaganda, for example Yellow Rain, and organized terrorism, even though he apparently had forgotten to mention them back in 1968. See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 159 and references. In 1986, re-labeled Mr. Jan Sejna, rather than General, he was dragged out again to explain how “Khrushchev ‘plotted drug war on West’”, by our friend Peter Samuel, The Australian, 24 December 1986, p. 5, based on an article by Sejna “in conjunction with... a northern Virginia security consultant”. Yes indeed.]

[381] .  This information on Nguyen Quan was published in “‘Yellow Rain’ and the Propaganda Mill”, an article which I prepared for Vietnam Today, Canberra, the Australia-Vietnam Society, No. 27, November 1983.

[382] .  Written 23 November 1983, published with deletions in Commentary, Volume 77, Number 2, February 1984, pp. 4-8. The sections omitted in Commentary’s publication are printed in italics.

[383] . Seth Mydans and Alan Dawson, Bangkok Post, respectively 28 and 30 April 1980; Grant Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers, Verso Editions, 1983 p.77). 

[384] . My conversation with Dr. Amos Townsend, in Bangkok, 17 August 1982; Grant Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers, pp. 80-81.

[385] . The Italian journal in question was Famiglia Cristiana, Sept 1976. For details of this incident see Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, pp. 173-178; and further on Ledeen see, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 28, 157-61, 165-66, and references. Famiglia Cristiana has now emerged again as a purveyor of strange things about Cambodia, as seen in PPP, no. 7/18, August 21 - September 3, 1998, Giorgio Fabretti, Italian journalist and founder of the “Save Pol Pot” fund, “Why should Anyone be Sorry for Pol Pot?”. Ledeen seems to be a recognized specialist in funneling spooky documents through Italian channels to be re-directed to the US press and intelligence services. In an interview with Ian Masters, aired on the Los Angeles public radio KPFK on April 3, 2005, then posted on AlterNet, April 7, 2005 with the title “Who Forged the Niger Documents?”, Vincent Cannistraro, one of the six ranking CIA operatives who savaged George Tenet’s book (At the Center of the Storm, New York, Harper Collins, 2007) agreed that Ledeen may have been the author of the report on Niger uranium which was sent back from Italian intelligence to the US.

[386] . Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers, pp. 58, ff. [Note that by 2002 Evans seemed to regret his earlier enthusiasm for exposing the yellow rain hoax. In his Short History of Laos (Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2002), in which he has dramatically switched sides from his earlier work, such as Red Brotherhood at War, he still acknowledges that the claims of yellow rain, “promoted by hawks in the USA, were never substantiated”, but that, p. 186, the campaign by Lao and Vietnamese forces against the Hmong in 1977 included “perhaps even the use of chemical agents”, and his book The Yellow Rainmakers is not included in his bibliography. As in other contexts in his Short History, Evans does not offer a correction of his previous interpretation, based, say, legitimately, on new evidence, but just seems to be changing sides.]

[387] . Grant Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers , pp. 101-02, and parliamentary question to Senator Gareth Evans, cited below,  p. 259. on the Australian case.

[388] . Conversation with Townsend.

[389] . Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers, p. 101.

[390] . Evans, pp. 92-93, 95, 98-100, 117-18, 122-23; and Lee Torrey, “ Yellow rain: is it really a weapon?”, New Scientist, 4 Aug 1983, pp. 350-351).

[391] . For example, in The Age, Melbourne, 19 March 1983.

[392] . The meeting was recorded by Townsend in his report of 19 August 1983.

[393] . Mark Lawrence, “Kampucheans gassed, Senate inquiry told”, The Age (Melbourne), 21 May 1981.

[394] . This parliamentary exchange was published in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs “Backgrounder”, No 446, 5 September 1984, p. xi, from which I have taken it. In a parliamentary debate on 19 March 1985, Foreign Minister Bill Hayden revealed that the Australian Department of Defense had discovered faked ‘Yellow Rain’ samples from Laos as early as 1982, but the government of the time, under the pro-American Liberal party, had not revealed it (Australian Hansard, 19 March 1985, p. xvii).

[395] . The Age (Melbourne) tried to renege on payment, offering A$300 when they proposed that I write for them, but trying to get away with A$150 after receiving it, and only paying up in full when I threatened to take the case to the Journalists’ Association.

[396] A French translation, by Serge Thion, appeared as, “Phnom Penh, décembre 1984”, in Cambodge histoire et enjeux: 1945-1985, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1985.

[397] .See discussion in Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 242-43; and Kampuchea Politics, Economics and Society, pp. 45-47.

[398]   Cummings-Bruce remained more comfortable with the straight anti-Phnom Penh line, even after it was no longer certain that it was the US regime line. See below, pp. 546.

[399] . A French version, entitled “La kremlinologie face au Cambodge”, translated by Marie-Claire Orieux, was published in Affaires cambodgiennes 1979-1989, Asie-Débat-5, Paris, Éditions l’Harmattan, 1989, pp. 129-35. The full English version has not previously been published.

[400] . William Lowther in The Age (Melbourne), 3 Jan 1987, a dispatch from Washington, D.C.

[401] . This was Stephen Heder in his “From Pol Pot to Pen Sovann to the Villages”, paper presented at the International Conference on Indochina and Problems of Security in Southeast Asia, Bangkok, Chulalongkorn University, June 1980, pp. 57-69; and in his statement before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, US Congress, Washington, D.C.,  21 October 1981, in which he strongly advocated US military support for the KPNLF against the PRK.

[402] For details and sources see Vickery, Kampuchea Politics, Economics, and Society, pp. 45-46 and notes.

[403] . Kong Korm did not live up to expectations, and the Foreign Ministry was reoccupied by Hun Sen in 1987 until given to Hor Nam Hong in 1989. Or perhaps, one should search for a very obscure, and, I would say this time, mistaken, Kremlinological signal. When Sam Rainsy formed his own Khmer Nation political party in 1995 with an extreme anti-Vietnamese plank in its programme, Kong Korm, having split with the CPP, appeared on its executive committee saying he had always disliked the pro-Vietnamese policy of the PRK.

[404] . Plus ça change. This was the mistake made by Kissinger in 1973. [(added in 2007) For the eight points see MacAlister Brown and Joseph J. Zasloff, Cambodia Confounds the Peacemakers 1979-1998, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 33].

[405] . For further description of personnel changes up to 1993 see Vickery, “The Cambodian People’s Party: Where has it come from, Where is it Going?”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 1994, Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (1994), pp. 102-20.

[406] . That letter was signed by Vlademir Shlapentokh, Chris Vanderpool, Richard Hellie (University of Chicago), and P. Timothy Bushnell.

[407] . For example, John Barron and Anthony Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land,

[408] . For example, the European-Kampuchea friendship groups which sympathize with the position of Democratic Kampuchea against the Peoples Republic. An example is the ‘Vänskapsföreningen Sverige-Kampuchea’ (Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Society) and its publication Kampuchea , edited by Hedda Eckerwald. [(added later) Since 1988, when I became acquainted with them, and the period of reference in this note, they have moved even farther from their original supportive position with respect to Democratic Kampuchea. The latest step is the return to Cambodia of one of the group who visited DK in 1978, along with Eckerwald and Jan Myrdal, Gunnar Bergstrom, who arrived for a visit of humble apology in November 2008 (PPP, 18 November 2008, p. 1)]

[409] . Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975-1978 Rendezvous with Death, Princeton University Press, 1989, in which four of the six contributors are present or former officers of the US State or Defense Departments, and another is François Ponchaud; William Shawcross [see below]; Elizabeth Becker [see above, pp. 189, ff.].

[410] . This was the claim made by a group of ex-CIA officers who in 1987 formed an organization, Association for Responsible Dissent, to work for reforms of CIA excesses. Reported by Aurelio Rojas (UPI), The Nation (Bangkok), 30 October, 1987; James Ridgeway, “The Moving Target”, Village Voice, 8 December, 1987; Coleman McCarthy, “Excesses of the CIA”, The Guardian Weekly, 20 December 1987. Since then they have vanished. A specific case of CIA creation of violence in a ‘Leninist’ state (see below, pp. 287, ff., Friedman), is described in In Search of Enemies, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978, by one of the founding members of the Association cited above, John Stockwell, an ex-CIA officer horrified by what the agency was doing in Angola. Others prominent in that association were Philip Agee, Philip Roettinger, David MacMichael. [(added 2007) Except for MacMichael, this seems to be a quite different group from the six who in 2007 denounced former CIA director George Tenet, not because they finally objected to CIA crimes, but because they feared that the bloopers of the Bush regime would discredit the spookdom in which they still believed (Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael).

[411] . Described in Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt. [Remember, I was writing in 1988 about 1940s Yugoslavia. These horrors have been repeated in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.]

[412] . Time, 15 July 1966 praised the massacres in Indonesia; and Time, 11 September 1978, pp. 14-15, reported that one-third of Brazilian youth “are growing up in circumstances so deprived that they are unlikely ever to play a useful role in modern society”, and within 20 years Brazil “will be burdened with millions of adults so undernourished, unskilled and uneducated that they will be impervious to any kind of civilizing process”. For other Brazilian horrors see Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991, 1996, pp. 137-28. For comparisons I made with Democratic Kampuchea see my Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 184.

[413] . The DK experience might have been a dangerous ‘virus’, of the type described by Noam Chomsky in Rethinking Camelot, Boston, South End Press, 1993, “Introduction”.  

[414] . This is the theory put out by John Barron and Anthony Paul about Khieu Samphan’s alleged impotence leading to a propensity for violence. See Murder of a Gentle Land, p. 47. [(added 2008)Unfortunately, later specialist studies of Pol Pot and his period are far too dependent on such speculative psychologizing as an explanatory device. See the utter silliness in Chandler, Brother Number One, first edition, p. 11, second edition, p. 10, “It is easy to imagine Saloth Sar... watching the masked and powdered dancers ... perhaps including his sister and his brother’s wife...”; first and second editions, p. 12, “It is impossible to say which impressions of the palace prevailed among Saloth Sar’s memories once he came to power ... He may have been thinking of his own uprooted childhood in a potentially hostile city...”; and first edition, p. 39, second edition, p. 37, the attribution of Saloth Sar’s anti-royalist ferocity in an article written in Paris to his “childhood spent among palace dancers exploited by the king and perhaps suffering from venereal infection”. Nothing we know about the young Saloth Sar suggests that his childhood was ‘uprooted’ or that he would then have seen Phnom Penh as a “potentially hostile city”, certainly not with his family connections to palace life; and Chandler’s allusion to venereal infection among the dancers, without specific sourcing, is sick orientalism. See review by Louis Paulsen, www.marxmail.org/archives/june98/cambodia.htm]

[415] . Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Collier books, pp. 32-33.

[416] . Mentioned in Hildebrand and Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, and based on official US documents.

[417] .[(added December 2006)] In fact, such bombing may have been considered. David Hume Kennerly, President Ford’s personal photographer has written that in a meeting of Ford with his National Security Council on 14 May 1975 (at which Kennerly was present) to discuss the Mayaguez incident one of the  Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended “a B-52 strike on Phnom Penh”, which Ford immediately rejected. Suppose Nixon had still been president. (David Hume Kennerly, “Gerald Ford Becoming President”, International Herald Tribune 29 December 2006, p.4)]

[418] . See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 16-17.

[419] . See Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973”, Vietnam Generation, Winter 1989, pp. 4-41. Discussed further below.

[420] . Contrast William Shawcross, Sideshow, with Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy, DD Books, Bangkok, pp. 48-50, where any connection between bombing and DK violence has been carefully expunged.

[421] . See below, “Shawcross in the 90s”. Shawcross was able to get away with distortions and lies about the PRK because of the protection afforded by the New York Review of Books, which refused to print critical refutations, and even permitted Shawcross to censor critics of his “The End of Cambodia”, NYRB 24 Jan 1980, and “The Burial of Cambodia”, NYRB 10 May 1984.See comment on these pieces above.

[422] . Ben Kiernan, “The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath”, Part I, p.1.

[423] . Ben Kiernan, “Conflict in the Kampuchean Communist Movement”, JCA 10, 1/2 (1980).

[424] . Kiernan, “Conflict”, pp. 27, 52.  [There is now, since 1993, more information on Pol Pot’s trip to China and whom he met there. See pp. 472-473 below].

[425] . Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot, p. 223.

[426] . See Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society, chapter 3, for more discussion.

[427] . See Edward Friedman, Backward Toward Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974; “Three Leninist Paths Within a Socialist Conundrum”, in Three Visions of Chinese Socialism, ed. by Dorothy J. Solinger, pp. 11-46, cited further as “Conundrum”; “After Mao: Maoism and Post-Mao China”, in Telos no. 65, Fall 1985, cited further as “After”; Friedman and Mark Selden, America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations, Vintage, 1973. [This paper, recall, was written in 1988. Friedman’s views on Deng Xiaoping and his reforms have changed since 1989 and the Tian An Men incident, as seen in his “Democratization and Re-Stalinization in China”, Telos 80 (Summer 1989, pp. 27-36)].

[428] . In April 1984, at an Asian Studies conference in Adelaide, Australia, to which Friedman had come at US government expense, he told some of us that the DK group on the Thai border, which he had just visited, deserved to be considered as a possible government in Cambodia because they had now renounced communism and would put into effect the same moderate policies being followed by the PRK, but unlike the latter would not be subservient to the Vietnamese invaders. Note here also the US ‘tilt’ against Viet Nam, and in favor of the Khmer Rouge. Friedman also claimed to have been given, while working with US government figures on the Thai border, secret information proving that Yellow Rain was real. This was at a time when the Yellow Rain propaganda was almost thoroughly discredited; and indeed within a few months it had been given up for good. At that time Friedman had apparently allowed himself to become an ‘asset’ for one section of the executive branch of the US government, like David Horowitz and Peter Collier, former New Leftists and collaborators on Ramparts magazine, who noisily switched to Reagan in the 1980s. [(added later) See Kathy Deacon, “Red Diaper Crybabies”, The Nation (New York), 17 February 1997, pp. 30-32.] Taking a close look, one wonders if Ramparts was not one of that special category of apparently liberal or intellectual journals financed by a branch of the US government for covert purposes. Besides Horowitz and Collier, another leading light of the old Ramparts was making strange statements in Finland, where he had been appointed ambassador, in 1995. Under the title “USA-ambassadören vill bli också glassimportör” (‘the US ambassador wants to be an icecream importer too’), Helsinki’s Swedish-language Huvudstadsbladet, 17 March 1995, reported on a talk entitled “The American Dream” by Derek Shearer, an old Ramparts hand, now “a convinced market economist”, to students of the Swedish-language Economics College. He boasted of such economic successes as the sale of Coca-Cola in Romania, which has stimulated private enterprise there in the form of small soft drink stands. “Coca-Cola is subversive”, he said. “The climate in the USA has always been less ideological than in Europe, and business as such was not questioned. Every young American has had his corner drink stand or sold Girl Scout Cookies” as a stage in developing the entrepreneurial spirit. Then, as prime examples of how things should go, Shearer cited Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, whose shops hand out brochures on “Caring Capitalism”, and he said he wanted to start importing it to Finland.]

[429] . “After”, 24; “Conundrum”, 35; “After”, 33. I admit it is unfair to dredge up the last quote out of its context where it does not sound quite so silly as standing alone.

[430] . “Conundrum”, 20.

[431] . Remember the Sonnenfeldt doctrine on the danger for the ‘Free World’ of communist regimes with human faces (Time 12 April 1976; Vickery, “Looking Back”, p. 111, Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, p. 218). An example of it in action was the rescue by the US of Stalinist General Jan Sejna from prosecution by the Dubcek government in 1968 (see note 379 above). Note in “Conundrum”, 18, Friedman’s rejection of Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, one of the reformers within a Leninist tradition. [(added later) Others were the Hungarians, George Konrad and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. The first reactions to Gorbachev were typical: “Mr. Gorbachev’s cherubic smile” hiding a “set of iron teeth” (see above, p. 271, n. 398].

[432] . “Conundrum”, 13-14.

[433] . “Conundrum”, 27; Chandler, A History, resorted to similar word mongering, third edition p. 245, fourth edition, p. 296, “the Leninist politics [Pol Pot] favored… can be seen in part as reflecting time-honored ideas of political behavior”. Does that mean kings of Angkor were Leninist before the fact?

[434] . Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 250, where I was discussing Stephen Heder’s use of ‘feudal fascism’ in his “From Pol Pot to Pen Sovann to the Villages”.

[435] . “Conundrum”, 35.

[436] . Friedman and Selden, p. x.

[437] . Friedman, “After”, p. 24. Note that Shawcross himself now rejects it. There is an example here of the peculiar way in which Friedman has read his sources, prying words and details out of context to cobble together to fit his argument. Against the bombing theory he cites Ben Kiernan’s How Pol Pot to the effect that “eastern Cambodia, where most of the bombs fell, was least receptive to Pol Pot’s policies” (f.n. 7), ‘proving’ that Pol Pot brutality was not provoked by bombing. This ignores, and it must be deliberate, that there were two separate bombing campaigns, the so-called secret bombing of 1969-1970, which was mostly in the East and close to the border with Viet Nam, and the much more massive bombing of the central plains, including part of the East, in 1973, which is the bombing in question. Incidentally the attribution of Shawcross’ bombing theory to Kiernan, must be to avoid embarrassing a now fellow US regime apologist with a theory which takes responsibility away from ‘communists’. See Kiernan’s further research on this subject (“The American Bombardment”) above, note 417, and below, p. 299.

[438] . Friedman obviously wished to preserve what Noam Chomsky has called the ‘ideological serviceability’ of the DK brutality, “offering justification for US crimes in Indochina for 25 years and for others in process and in the works” (Chomsky, Powers & Prospects, chapter 3, “Writers and Intellectual Responsibility”, p. 57)

[439] . “Conundrum”, 35

[440] . “After”, 38. See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, chapter 5.

[441] . “Conundrum”, 26.

[442] . See Cambodia 1975-1982, chapter 5; this view was also shared by the non-Marxist Russian peasant expert Alexander Chayanov. See Michael Heller, “Survivors from Utopia”, SURVEY, 21/3(96), Summer 1975 pp. 155-166, including, pp. 156-57, an assessment of fiction by Chayanov (penname Ivan Kremnev), The Journey of my Brother Alexei to the Land of the Peasant Utopia, Moscow 1920. In this story Chayanov starts with victory of the countryside; peasants first get equal voting rights, then seize power by parliamentary means; “In 1932, power is firmly in the hands of the peasant party. A decree is passed authorizing the destruction of the towns. In 1937, the towns...organize an uprising, are defeated and ‘dissolve in the peasant sea’“. And in 1984 a peasant says “we had no need of any new principles [introduced into our social and economic life] at all; our task consisted in affirming the age-old principles which have served as the basis of the peasant economy from time immemorial”.

[443] . “Conundrum”, 26.

[444] . “After”, 34, nn. 31, 30. Hawk found nothing of the sort himself in France, but acquired such information from the work of Cambodia scholars whom Friedman does not wish to acknowledge.

[445] . Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 240-243, quotation p. 240.

[446] . See Khieu Samphan, “Cambodia’s Economy and Industrial Development”, trans. by Laura Summers, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, Data Paper 111, March 1979; see especially pp. 74-75.

[447] . “Conundrum”, 27. Note again Edward Herman’s remark, above, on the use of the Khmer Rouge to discredit all socialisms, seen in Elizabeth Becker’s throwaway lines on Franz Fanon (Becker, p. 278).

[448] . Irene Gendzier, Franz Fanon, 220.

[449] . For Fanon see Gendzier; for positive CIA interest in DK see Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”, and comments above, passim., on the US ‘tilt’ toward DK. Even had the future Cambodian revolutionaries been familiar with Fanon’s ideas, it is unlikely that they would have accepted guidance from an African. This question was investigated in more detail by Sacha Sher in his Ph.D. thesis, “Le parcours politique des ‘Khmers rouges’ : formation, édification, projet et pratiques, 1945-1978”, l’Université Nanterre Paris-X, 2002, where, p. 89, n. 294, noting that another practitioner of reverse intellectual history, Karl. D. Jackson, in Cambodia 1975-1978, pp.246-248, had tried to adduce influence from Fanon on DK, Sher actually asked one of them, Ieng Sary’s close associate Suong Sikoeun, who answered Sher in writing on 20 February 2001, that « Je peux vous affirmer que personne n’avait lu “les Damnés de la Terre” (‘ I can assure you that no one [in the Paris Cercle Marxiste-Léniniste of Khmer students] had read “les Damnés de la Terre[‘Wretched of the Earth’]”), which first appeared in 1961 when most of them had already left Paris. 

[450] . Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Penguin Books, 1976 (first published 1970), and Limits to Medicine, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, Penguin Books, 1977 (first published 1976). Graham Greene, The Quiet American, Hammondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1962. I did not think to include Illich in my discussion of the nature of the Cambodian revolution in Cambodia, chapter 5. Then in Phnom Penh in 1986 I met Herman Schwember, a Chilean engineer who had fled his country after Allende’s overthrow, and who had worked for a time in Sandinista Nicaragua. He had read my book, and his first comment when he met me was that the DK program was “pure Illichism”. [Comment on Illich is included in the new introduction to the second edition of Cambodia 1975-1982, Chiang Mai, Silkworm books, 1999.]

[451] . My point is not affected by the question of the economic rationality or success of the Stalinist program with which I am not concerned here.

[452] . Evoked clearly in the dénouement of the popular classical novel Tum Teav. Even Chandler, in his History, fourth edition, p.244, notes that under Sihanouk “hundreds of dissidents disappeared… and are presumed… assassinated”.

[453] . Bun Chan Mol, Kuk niyobay [‘Political prison’], quoted in Cambodia 1975-1982, 14, n. 39. And from whom did the US-backed Republic of Vietnam police learn how to use ‘tiger cages’ to confine political prisoners – a method very similar to the shackles employed in DK prisons? And after an insurrection in southern Viet Nam in 1940 “over five thousand people were arrested… jail cells, handcuffs and chains were all in short supply, but the French improvised, packing ‘prisoners into dry-docked ships floating in the Saigon river. For want of chains and handcuffs, wires piercing the hands and heels of prisoners were used to hold them in one place’” (Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990,  New York, Harper Perennial, 1991, p. 5).

     Enforced evacuation and resettltment could also have been observed from American actions in Viet Nam—although not of urban folk, but of poor peasants, the Americans’ enemies. They oversaw “a forced resettlement of peasants into an area designed as a completely integrated community…[where, however] security was the only consideration…[p]easants were transported from their regular homesteads to a new place, where, often far from their rice fields, they were expected to re-establish their lives, with only minimal assistance from the government”  (William R. Corson, The Betrayal, New York, Ace Boks, 1968, p. 47).

See comment on French colonial ‘tutorials’ in Lewis, Dragon Apparent, pp. 99-100, 144-145.

[454] . Sorel, 107.

[455] . Sorel, 108-109.

[456] . From Le Portail, Paris, La Table Ronde, 2000, p. 167, English translation The Gate, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, pp. 114-115, by François Bizot who was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1970 and interrogated personally by Deuch.

[457] . Short, Pol Pot, p. 47, has made the same point, interestingly in almost identical language. See also his pp. 72-73 for the influence of the French Revolution on the future DK intellectuals when they were studying in Paris. And one should not forget that the French Revolution, from which much of modern democratic practice is held to have evolved, committed genocide (elimination of entire classes—royalty, aristocracy), destruction of religion, and eventually execution of many of its original leaders, just as occurred in Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.

[458] . In fact in the mouths of major US regime figures the very terms ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ , and ‘human rights’ have become obscenities. [Note that this was written in 1988, and is even more apposite now (2010). The Internal Security Acts which in Malaysia and Singapore permit arrest and years of incarceration without trial are relics of British ‘democracy’].

[459] . But as Friedman (should I say Friedman phase I?) and Selden, op. cit., p. x, noted nearly 20 years ago, American Asian scholarship may lag behind other intellectual fields.

[460] . See my discussion of this in Cambodia 1975-1982, chapter 5. An interesting case of fear of what peasant rebels might do was Tsar Nicholas II. Although he considered serfdom evil, he feared the example of Pugachev (1770s), which “proved how far popular rage can go”; throughout his reign he feared two different kinds of revolution, (1) the danger of the gentry obtaining a constitution if the government tried to free serfs, (2) “On the other hand, an elemental, popular uprising might also be unleashed by such a major shock to the established order as the coveted emancipation” (from Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, third edition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 363).

[461] . See his Backward Toward Revolution.

[462] . Perhaps Chayanov, cited above, n. 440, was an exception.

[463] . Charles Horner, “From Nixon to Pol Pot” [a review of Sideshow], Commentary, August 1979, pp. 62-66; Peter W. Rodman, “Sideswipe: Kissinger, Shawcross and the Responsibility for Cambodia”, The American Spectator, Vol. 14, No. 3 (March 1981), pp. 1-15; George F. Will, “Bringing down the Curtain on Shawcross’ ‘Sideshow’“, Washington Post, 26 February 1981; and Shawcross’ effective reply in William Shawcross, “Shawcross Swipes Again in hot pursuit of Peter Rodman”, The American Spectator, Vol. 14, No. 7, July 1981, pp. 7-13. [(added 2007) Certainly now Shawcross does not want any such help, for he has now joined his “critics even farther to the extreme right”, in fact the most severe, Peter Rodman, in “To Understand What US Defeat in Iraq Will Mean, Look at Indochina”. See discussion below, p. 571]

[464] . See Kiernan, “American Bombardment”. [Several years after writing the above, I met a Dutch doctor who had been investigating psychological trauma among villagers in the region of Kompong Speu, west of Phnom Penh, and who found that many of them recalled the bombing as their time of terror, to which the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 brought relief] 

[465] . Cited from Friedman & Selden, op. cit., pp. 358-9,385; Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, Stanford, 1962.

[466] . Newsweek, 29 August 1988, pp. 46-48, “Treating War’s Psychic Wounds”. See also Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, “Epilogue.

[467] . On perceptions of urban snobbery see again Vickery. Cambodia, chapter 1.

[468] . The Bangkok Post published this in, ‘Postbag’ (letters), 7 July 1986.

[469]   The first ASEAN proposal was in 1981; and in 1985 ASEAN was showing new interest in a negotiating process with Vietnam. Shultz was quoted in the Bangkok Post, 13 July 1985. See above, p. 58, text with note 123.

[470] . See further on Nicaragua and Cambodia below, pp. 332-333.

[471] . Developments within the PRK at that time have been described in my Kampuchea Politics, Economics, and Society; and details of Vietnamese withdrawals and their treatment in US regime literature are in Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 20-30.

[472] . “Statement by Stephen R. Heder, Ph.D. Candidate, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University”, before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, on “US Policy in the Indochina Region Since Vietnam’s Occupation of Kampuchea”, 21 October 1981 (see also text above with note 399). At the time Heder enjoyed the reputation of a leftist, even perhaps far-leftist (John Pilger once called him a ‘State Department Maoist’). This reputation may have been undeserved. In re-reading what he wrote in those years, not to speak of what he has done subsequently, I find nothing that is particularly ‘left’, in fact nothing that could not have been written by an ambitious young employee of the Rand Corporation. In a way, Heder’s post-1979 trajectory is reminiscent of Horowitz and Collier (above and below,  pp. 286,  389). When, in 1979, it became impossible to make a career as a ‘Cambodian’ leftist, Heder decided to make his way back into respectability by supporting US-regime positions.

[473] . Peter Rothberg, review of Robert Parry, Fooling America, Z Magazine, May 1993, p. 59; Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Kampuchea: After the Worst, New York 1985, p. ii. I met Bonner once during his visit to the Khmer camps.

[474] . Michael Vickery, “Kampuchea isn’t a ‘Human-Rights Horror’”, AWSJ, 22 April 1985, a letter in answer to a summary of their report by Abrams and Orentlicher in AWSJ, 18 March 1985, p. 9, also published in the New York Wall Street Journal, 8 April 1985, p. 17. They responded to my letter in “Punishing Cambodia Again”, Washington Post, 23 August 1985. My full critique was, “A Critique of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Kampuchea Mission of November 1984”, JCA, Vol. 18 No. 1 (1988), pp. 108-116.

[475] . This draft was written in 1990, adding new material to an original text of June 1987, as will be indicated below. The 1987 text was published in an abridged Swedish translation, “Amnesty International och kriget mot Kampuchea”, in the journal Kommentar (Stockholm), Nr 8/1988, pp. 33-39.

[476] . See FEER, 21 May 1987, pp.6-7.

[477] . I in fact know only one person who claims first-hand experience with all of the practices listed, but Kampucheans whom I knew at the time believed such was standard operating procedure of the police, just as Amnesty’s sources for its new “Kampuchea Political Imprisonment and Torture” believe their evidence may be widely generalized.

[478] . Amnesty report, “Kampuchea Political Imprisonment and Torture”, p. 36. See my translation of the 1986 law, in “Criminal Law in the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea”, JCA, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1987), 508-518. 

[479] . I wrote the article at the invitation of Murray Hiebert for the issue of Indochina Issues published in September 1986. It was then rejected by William Goodfellow.

[480] . In 1998 Floyd Abrams was featured again in the press in the attacks on April Oliver’s material on an alleged American assassination mission against US defectors in the Vietnam war. Among other encomiums Abrams was called a ‘First Amendment Lawyer’. His work on Cambodia, however, putting a US regime spin on the available information, rather adds credence to Oliver’s material. Perhaps ‘First Amendment Lawyer’ means one who works for freedom to spin regime propaganda without being called to account. For Oliver’s defense see Oliver, “Did the US use sarin in Laos?”, The Nation (Bangkok), 24 July 1998, reprinted from Washington Post.

[481] . On the refugee camps at that time see Michael Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”,

[482] . Note that below local place names have been preserved as in the original text, and may not agree with current official orthography.

[483] . Having demonstrated that Heder and the Lawyers did not know what they were talking about and were pulling propaganda tricks out of the air, I must now confess to having learned, in trips to Cambodia in 1991 and 1992, that they may in fact have been correct about the Vietnamese origin of the ‘T’ designations. At least, my Khmer acquaintances in Phnom Penh thought that ‘T’ and ‘TK’ had been Vietnamese administrative designations, but they did not know for certain, nor if so, did they know what Vietnamese terms lay behind the abbreviation. This was particularly true for ‘TK’, but none of those I was able to ask was familiar with Battambang.

[484] . AI Index: ASA 23/01/88

[485] . This was noted by a 1940s Cambodian political prisoner, Bun Chan Mol, in his book Kuk Niyobay (‘Political Prison’), Phnom Penh, 1971. See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 14, and n. 39.

[486] . See below, p. 355, on the Kampuchea article.

[487] . Michael Vickery, “The debate to apportion blame”, PPP, 4/16, 11-24 August 1995, p, 7; and Stephen Heder, “Paranoia, genocide, and the history books”, PPP, 4/22, 3-16 November 1995, p. 16.

[488] . See, for example, “Cambodia 1988”, in ASIEN, German Association for Asian Studies, Hamburg , Nr. 28, April 1988, Hamburg, pp. 1-19, although most of the content of that article was different.

[489] . Obviously my projection of a change in 1988 was misplaced.

[490] . See “ Kremlinology and Cambodia”, above, pp. 270, ff.

[491] . This argument appeared not only “in anti-PRK circles”. See Grant Evans, FEER, Vol. 137, No. 32, 6 Aug 1987, p. 4, Letters to the Editor, “Vickery’s claims for Cambodian freedom of action rest on ‘the rapid promotion of persons with no pre-1975 revolutionary background to leadership positions.’ This, he suggests, implies that their accession to power is independent of Vietnamese patronage, whereas the realities of Vietnamese influence in Cambodia since 1979 demonstrates the opposite”. My argument was that the promotions of those people showed that conventional wisdom about “the realities of Vietnamese influence” required revision. [Evans here seemed to be starting the shift which led, by 2002, to his complete ideological flipflop in Laos A Short History, and by 2006 to an utterly reactionary defense of the Thai monarchy in his review of Paul Handley’s The King Never Smiles, in FEER,  September 2006, pp. 58-62]

[492] . Kampuchea (Phnom Penh newspaper) 7 August 1986, p. 16. Other dates of early PRK diplomatic relations were presentation of ambassadorial letters of accreditation, USSR 28 May 1979; Vietnam 24 December 1979; Cuba 29 November 1982; Laos 18 February 1983; India 13 September 1982.

[493] . SWB FE/8129/A1/1-4, 9 December 1985, and Kampuchea (Phnom Penh) 7 August 1986, p. 16. If anyone scoffs that my reading of signals here is too exotic to believe, even in terms of old-fashioned Kremlinology, I would like to point them to a commentary by a leading US Soviet scholar, an experienced Kremlinologist, Jerry F. Hough. Hough sent this out by e-mail, on “Johnson’s Russia List #22014, 12 January 1998, entitled “The breakup of the Soviet Union”. There he said that President George Bush “In April 1991, ...changed policy towards Kashmir from plebiscite to referendum to signal that we did not favor independence for Lithuania”. There is real Kremlinological signaling.

[494] . SWB FE/8119/A1/2, 27 November 1985. Note again the Hayden position which, as described above, p. 245, so irritated the anti-Phnom Penh coalition.

[495] . Nation (Bangkok) 18 October 1987, pp.1-2; 30 October 1987, p.5.

[496] . Nation, 4 November 1987, p.2; also Bangkok Post, same date, p.1).

[497] . Nation, 5 November 1987, Bangkok Post, 6 November 1987; Nation, 8 November and 6 November 1987, p. 2, respectively.

[498] . My inspiration was Soizick Crochet’s , “The ‘good ol’ days’“, in PPP, Vol. 4, No. 4, 24 Feb-9 March 1995, p. 6, criticizing Chantou Boua’s article in PPP, Vol. 3, No. 25, 16-19 December 1994. My letter was published in PPP, Vol. 4, No. 8, 21 April-4 May, 1995, pp. 6, 19. 

[499] . See the articles written after that trip, above, pp. 153-176.

[500] . Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 44, 175.

[501] . And which after 1991 have again been encouraged under the impact of UNTAC and the FUNCINPEC returnees.

[502] . Marie-Alexandrine Martin is a biologist and ethnologist, and a specialist in the Phnom Kravanh area of western Cambodia. She wrote several articles relatively favorable to DK, such as “La riziculture et la maîtrise de l’eau dans le Kampuchea démocratique”, Paris, Etudes rurales 83 (1981), pp. 7-44; “L’Industrie dans le Kampuchea démocratique”, Paris, Etudes rurales 89-91 (1983), pp. 77-110; “La politique alimentaire des Khmers rouges”, Paris, Etudes rurales 99-100 (1985), pp. 347-365, and other articles very critical of the Vietnamese and the PRK, for example, “Vietnamised Cambodia. A Silent Ethnocide”, in Indochina Report (Singapore), No. 7 (July-Sept 1986), on which see further below, note 520. Two significant books by her are Le mal cambodgien Paris, Hachette, 1989, translated into English as Cambodia: a Shattered Society, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, and Les Khmer Daeum, “Khmers de l’Origine”, Paris, Presses de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1997.

[503] . Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, Society, pp. 157-9.

[504] . See Andrea Panaritis, ‘Cambodia: The Rough Road to Recovery’, Indochina Issues, April 1985, particularly pp. 2-3.

[505] . Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Kampuchea: After the Worst, New York 1985, pp. 43, 100, 128. See above, p.313, ‘Sameth Sim’.

[506] . There are short inscriptions in Cham, Mon, and Pyu from before the 7th century, but the extant written record of those languages is poor compared to Khmer. The earliest record of Javanese is from the 8th century, Burmese from the 12th, Vietnamese from the 13th, and Thai from the 13th or 14th.

[507] . Nevertheless, as a few nationalists recognized, a too hasty indigenization of the language of instruction in high schools and universities would also work to the disadvantage of the lower classes, and permit traditional elites to maintain a stranglehold on the upper levels of state service, or in any field where communication with the outside world was required, because their children would acquire the necessary foreign languages through private instruction. A good example is Malaysia where the language of instruction in high schools and universities was changed very quickly during 1975-76 from English to Malay, but where English is still essential for top positions both in the public and private sectors.

[508] . For a sympathetic French survey of contemporary Khmer literature in the 1940s-1950s, see Pierre Bitard, “La littérature cambodgienne moderne”, France-Asie, Présence du Cambodge, no. 114-115, Nov-Dec 1955, pp. 467-482.

[509] . Becker, When the War Was Over (first edition), p. 444. Becker, second edition, pp. 508-517, dropped the anti-Vietnamese distortions and treated SOC more favorably; Esmeralda Luciolli, Le mur de bambou, Paris 1988, p. 199. See above, pp.

[510] . Becker, op. cit., p. 539.

[511] . According to Luciolli, “reading texts are ‘adapted’ to socialism’, the vocabulary of the old regimes of Lon Nol and Sihanouk is banned in favor of revolutionary language, and teachers must use the official terms, the same as under the Khmer Rouge” (198)

[512] . Also confirmed by information elicited from refugees in previ­ous years. See Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 232-233.

[513] . Saveros Lewitz, “Note sur la dérivation par affixation en khmer moderne (Cambodgien)”, Revue de l’École Nationale des Langues Orientales, volume 5 (1968), pp. 117-127.

[514] . Lewitz, p. 121.

[515] . Lewitz, p. 122.

[516] . I was first apprised of the de facto continuation of Khemarayeanakam in the PRK, and of the identities of some of the personnel in­volved, by Dr. Ea Meng Try, a Cambodian pedagogue, former jour­nalist and political activist, who now lives in Australia [and now, 2008, for several yeas, in Cambodia He is not the Ea Meng Try who has been active with DCCam (Documentation Center Cambodia) and the Khmer Rouge tribunal]. Dr. Meng Try also pointed out that the new Khmer grammar textbooks produced for PRK schools continue the pedagogical trends established in the 1960s.

[517] . For an interesting treatment of some of these stories see Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest”, cited above, note 16.

[518] . These observations on PRK literature textbooks should be considered provisional, because the examples in my possession are few, policies may be changing rapidly, and because until asked to prepare this survey I had not devoted much attention to that aspect of PRK policies.

[519] . See Andrea Panaritis, ‘Cambodia: The Rough Road to Recovery’, Indochina Issues, April 1985, particularly pp. 2-3. Here again Luciolli, Mur de bambou, p. 199, manages to disinform, claiming that the Vietnamese had tried to enforce the use of their language in the Medical School, and that French was only permitted after 1985

[520] . The full title of Luciolli’s article in Indochina Report was “Daily Life in Cambodia: A Personal Account”, and its Part II, pp. 6-15 was “Vietnamisation Process”. I wish to thank my colleague, Ramses Amer, for locating this article for me. See further below.

[521] . All footnotes to this letter added later. Lucy’s Tiger Den was a bar in Bangkok’s Patpong Road which Dawson in earlier columns had occasionally named as his watering hole.

[522] . See note 365 above. A relevant example is their “Pre-Publication Issue”, October 1984, consisting of a single anonymous article also entitled “The Vietnamisation of Kampuchea”, subtitle “A New Model of Colonialism”. This should not be confused with Luciolli’s publication.  Other articles on the same topic were No.3 (July-September 1985), “The Military Occupation of Kampuchea”, attributed to “a team of analysts led by a prominent journalist based in Bangkok”, and No. 7 (July-Sept 1986), “Vietnamised Cambodia. A Silent Ethnocide”, by Marie Alexandrine Martin. Like the Amnesty International reports during the 1980s (see above, pp. 305-330), the October 1984 issue at least was produced for the specific purpose of influencing a UN vote. As described then by Thailand’s current (1998) Foreign Minister, Surin Pitsuwan, “The Report that forestalled Vietnam’s ruse at the UN”, Bangkok Post, 10 December 1984, p. 4. Before the UN debate on Cambodia that year, ASEAN diplomats, especially Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani, wished to counter Vietnam’s “whispers and rumours of peace...intended to deceive international opinion”. They received ‘unexpected’ support “by the appearance of an unusual document known as the Indochina Report published by a private research group in Singapore”; and Mr. Surin went on to summarize and to praise the report.

[523] . The unexpected speed of the KR retreat and the Vietnamese advance was noted in Timothy Carney’s presentation to the 1982 Princeton conference (“The Heng Samrin Armed Forces and the Military Balance in Cambodia”, in The Cambodian Agony, pp. 180-212.); and see Sihanouk’s comments on destruction and revival of the KR in T.D. Allman, “Sihanouk’s Sideshow”, Vanity Fair (April 1990, pp. 151-60, 226-34), pp. 158-9, “In 1979 and 1980...I begged your government [the US] not to support the Khmer Rouge”;  “To save Cambodia, all you [westerners] had to do was to let Pol Pot die”, in 1979 “Pol Pot was dying and you brought him back to life”. 

[524] . This last comment, obviously, has been added since the Vietnamese left Cambodia in 1989, and fully accepted the results of the UNTAC intervention and election in 1993.

[525] . Published in The Nation as (part 1) “Cambodia Laying Some Groundwork”, 5 Feb 1989, and (part 2) “Economic Headway in Cambodia”, 12 Feb 1989.

[526] .The distribution of these cases by year was: 1984-3, 1985-5, 1986-10, 1987-26, 1988-17 (up to July). In comparison with the capitalist countries of Southeast Asia, where accused often sit years in jail waiting for their cases to reach court, this is quite a commendable record. I cannot imagine a newspaper in Malaysia, Singapore, or Thailand complaining, or even considering it as a matter for complaint, that suits brought only in the current or preceding year had not yet been settled.

[527] . English translation of the law by Michael Vickery, “Criminal Law in the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea”, JCA, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1987), 508-518.  

[528] . This organization insisted that they not be named, in order to maintain their official position of neutrality.

[529] . Contrary to my prognosis here, the UNTAC intervention in 1992-1993 with its enforced capitalist free-market society, and the reintroduction of contra political parties with reactionary social attitudes which ensued, brought to an end the progress in the situation of women seen under the PRK, until by the end of the 1990s it appeared that they might again be placed in the same situation as before 1975. In the last decade (1997-2007), however, young women have increasingly sought higher education in the new private educational institutions, are moving into work in offices, businesses, hotels, etc., and maintain increasingly independent lifestyles, including in the choice of husbands.

[530] . This section of the text was also published as “The rule of Law in Cambodia”, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 3 (1990), pp.82-83.

[531] . This new indigenous grass-roots enterprise was destroyed after the international capitalist intervention along with UNTAC in 1992-1993, which opened the way for foreign capital, mostly from the Asian capitalist countries, to overwhelm Cambodia.

[532] . FEER, 22 December 1988.

[533] . Sidney Jones, “War and Human Rights in Cambodia”, NYRB, 19 July 1990, pp. 15, ff.

[534] . Jones, note 6, in reference to my two-part article above, “Cambodia Laying Some Groundwork”, The Nation (Bangkok), 5 Feb 1989, and “Economic Headway in Cambodia”, The Nation, 12 Feb 1989.

[535] . Tom Nagorski, “Wanted at Site 2: Law and Order”, The Nation (Bangkok), 9 June 1989, p. 25. After the formation of the post-election government in 1993 at least one of the lawyers quoted by Nagorski, Ken  Bingham, moved, along with his students, to teach law in Phnom Penh under the auspices of Asia Foundation. The transparent purpose was to develop anti-government lawyers.

[536] . See Michael Vickery, “Refugee Politics: The Khmer Camp system in Thailand”,  pp. 305-6.

[537] . One piece of documentation which has never been properly followed up is noted in my “Cambodia (Kampuchea): History, Tragedy, and Uncertain Future”, BCAS, Twentieth Anniversary Issue on Indochina and the War, Vol. 21, Nos. 2-4 (April-December 1989), pp. 35-58 (see p. 35 and note 1, concerning a letter from Jonathan Winer, counsel to Senator John Kerry, about direct US aid to the Khmer Rouge. Although soon after this letter was made public Winer refused further contact, and those uncomfortable with what he had said tried to deny his credibility, his Washington bona fides as a financial analyst are now supported by an International Herald Tribune article of 21 September 2001, p. 1, entitled “Bin Laden Money Trail: How America Stumbled”, citing Jonathan Winer, “who led the State Department’s international law enforcement efforts from 1994 to 1999” on the subject of hawala banking, an institution which has been revealed to the US public since the September 11 events (further on Winer see the 18 June 2001 Nation (New York) article “After Dirty Air, Dirty Money”, by Lucy Komisar, citing “Jonathan Winer, a former high-level crime-policy official in the Clinton State Department”). For more detail from Winer’s letter see Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, p. 35. See also Ben Kiernan, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, p. 251.

[538] . See my “Democratic Kampuchea – CIA to the Rescue”.

[539] Vickery, “Criminal Law in the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea”, JCA (1987). See comment on the Amnesty report in question above, pp. 305, ff.

[540] . See my published comments on the similarity of US backing for ‘contras’ in both countries, above, pp. 301-2. Ms. Jones had referred to a similar suggestion by Senator John Kerry about post-Sandinista Nicaragua as a model for what the US should strive for in Cambodia.

[541] . See my “A Critique of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Kampuchea Mission of November 1984”, JCA, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1988), pp. 108-116, see pp. 110, 111. On a later visit I obtained three more volumes of published law texts, about 300 pages.

[542] . See my Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society, chap. 9; my “Cambodia 1988”, ASIEN (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Asienkunde, Hamburg), Nr. 28, July 1988, pp. 1-20; and my “Cambodia”, in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long, eds., Coming to Terms, Indochina, the United States and the War, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1991, pp. 89-128, for description of the separate and more successful economic management in Cambodia than in Vietnam, up to late 1988.

[543] . Gary Klintwoth, “Hanoi’s role in Cambodia”, FEER  5 October 1989, p. 38; Tommy T.B. Koh, “Hanoi’s role in Cambodia”, FEER 26 October 1989, p. 28

[544] . Letter to the Editor, published in FEER , 11 November 1989.

[545] . Vickery, Kampuchea, Politics, Economics, and Society, pp. 48, 80-81.

[546] . Letter to the Editor, FEER, 11 January 1990. Apparently afraid to offend a Singapore ambassador, editor Bowring, in the publication, changed ‘Rip van Koh’ to ‘Ambassador Tommy Koh’.

[547] . Letter to the Editor, FEER, 9 February 1990.

[548] . Poole is quoted above, p 120. Others who offered similar opinions were US regime cold war intellectual Guy Pauker (see above, p. 119), and political scientist, author of a well-received book on the Vietnam war, War Comes to Long An, Jeffrey Race. See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, first edition pp.64- 65, second edition, pp. 69-70.  Race was one of the group who in 1976 wrote “Blueprint for the Future of Thailand”, published in six installments in the Bangkok Post, 15-25 February 1976. They argued that if Thailand was to avoid a revolution “the surplus population of the cities should return to the countryside, much more investment should be made in agriculture, the administration should be decentralized, unproductive wealth should be taken from the rich, and political power from the old elites” – all Khmer Rouge policies, which if implemented soon enough in Thailand might avoid a Khmer Rouge-type revolution. Such a suggestion was and is utopian. Revolutionary policies of that type cannot be implemented without a revolution, and arguing that they are necessary simply means supporting revolution, which is never a gentle procedure, and which Race certainly did not desire. See Race, “The Future of Thailand”, Pacific Community, Vol. 8, No. 2 (January 1977), pp. 303-325. Revolutions from above, about which Race was fantasizing, are always in the interests of power holders, not for the benefit of poor peasants or oppressed workers. [2010: Thailand’s political fragility, which Race’s suggestions highlighted, is even more apparent, and potentially revolutionary, thirty years later.]

[549] . In FEER of 8 March 1990 Bowring published a letter against me from a certain Willy van Damme, proving that “closing this correspondence” was an act of censorship.

[550] . Philip Bowring, “Without Feer”, South China Morning Post October 30, 2004.

[551] . The Guardian’s treatment showed the typical deviousness of even the most respectable press. I submitted it as an article, for payment, but after cutting out a couple of sentences, including a criticism of their own reporting, they published it as a letter. The excisions, changes, and an altered reference by the Editor are marked in the text with {}. Footnotes have been added later.

[552] . On the US government professionals see Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous With Death. Four of the six writers of its nine chapters, Jackson, Timothy Carney, Charles H. Twining, and Kenneth M. Quinn, were Cambodia or Southeast Asia specialists in the service of the US government.

[553] . On this subject see Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 9-13, and passim.

[554] . Twining was US Ambassador in Phnom Penh from 1991 to 1994, when Quinn took over that post. Carney directed an important component of UNTAC during the election of 1993 in Cambodia. On Ponchaud see Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm ; Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, Index references (but note that in his chapter in this book Ponchaud reversed himself on some important points). Hawk has a background with Amnesty International and as a researcher on violence during the DK period. From sometime after the 1993 election until late in 1998 he worked in the United Nations Center for Human Rights in Phnom Penh.

[555] . This was Laura Summers, an American who teaches Political Science at Hull University. Her remarks, entitled “Increased Pressure Must be Brought to Bear on Vietnam”, were published in “The Third International Conference on Kampuchea 25-26 July, 1987, Bangkok, Thailand”, Bangkok, Department of Press and Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, August 1987, pp. 48-49.

[556] . The CIA pamphlet was published by the National Foreign Assessment Center, May 1980. I dissected it in “Democratic Kampuchea – CIA to the Rescue”, in BCAS.

[557] . Dawson’s crack about Woolongong was aimed at Ben Kiernan, and at the time I was employed at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang.

[558] . See Dawson, “Black propaganda more than little white lies”, 15 July 1990.

[559] . The reason for this remark was that in his published answer to my published comment on his review of Cambodia 1975-1978 (above) he had considered it important to tell his readers that Lucy’s Tiger Den had been closed and he did his drinking in Mississippi Queen, another famous Bangkok bistro.

[560]   John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, London, Bantam Press, 2006, pp. 227-229.

[561] . For more sources on the matter see Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, pp. 56, 134, 137. Dawson’s main point in the 1993 note, in the Bangkok Post “Post Bag”, 11 October 1993, was, “Beware of AIDS disinformation”, refuting a repeat of the story that AIDS was invented at Fort Detrick, referring to a “detailed explanation...in the Sunday Post on July 15, 1990. It identifies the Soviet KGB agents who thought it up and where they planted it”.

[562] . Footnote removed.

[563] Richard Ehrlich, Bangkok Post, 8 July 1990. For details see below, pp. 403, ff.

[564]. On this see “Recent Developments in Cambodia”, a talk by Stephen R. Heder, Australian National University, 5 September 1990, printed and distributed by Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge, Washington, D.C., p. 2, “...I have seen no evidence that any of the ex-Khmer Rouge in positions of high political authority in today’s Cambodia were involved in large-scale or systematic killing of Cambodian civilians...it seems they were not deeply involved in any of the massacres of Cambodian civilians that took place between April 1975 and January 1979”.

[565] . In his A History of Cambodia, third edition, p. 238, Chandler neglects to say that their offense was to form a new party, asserting rather that they were trying to “loosen the country’s alliance with Vietnam” but were “thwarted by hard-liners in the PRK” and accused of “counterrevolutionary activities”. Not unexpectedly, for Chandler, there is no source for this interpretation, and at least ‘loosening the Vietnamese alliance’ is way off base, typical of the throwaway lines about Cambodia-Viet Nam relations that pepper his writings. That alliance had been loosening since 1981, dramatically since 1985, and the last Vietnamese troops had been withdrawn in 1989. Of course, Chandler may have uncritically repeated Phnom Penh gossip, which since 1979 has interpreted every sudden change, or unexpected death, of leading personnel, as Vietnamese machinations – again the ‘Vietnam syndrome’. These remarks, and any reference to the event, have been removed from his fourth edition, 2008. The most detailed treatment of the question is in Gottesman, pp. 336-350, which, based on later interviews, like much of Gottesman, requires very careful reading.

[566] . For those too young to remember, New Republic was once one of the leaders among the left liberal press, but in the 1980s turned to retrospective support for the US war in Vietnam and active support for US policy in the Caribbean, especially in Nicaragua (see Al Santoli, “The New Indochina War”, The New Republic, 30 May 1983, pp. 19-23, and on Nicaragua, Ronald Radosh, New Republic, 24 October 1983, p.7). On Horowitz, Collier, and Friedman see above, p. 286 and note 426. Later Friedman left BCAS, following acrimonious discussions among the editorial board on what BCAS should say about the rape of an Okinawan girl by US servicemen in September 1995. Friedman’s position was that this was not the type of issue in which BCAS should get involved. In particular he did not want BCAS to take an anti-US military position, or suggest that US military be withdrawn from Japan. In the end, except for a laudably tough piece in the “Notes from the Field” section (BCAS, Vol 27, No 4, 1995, p. 91-94, “The US Military and Sexual Violence against Women”, by Saundra Sturtevant), BCAS dropped the issue. Beginning with BCAS , Vol 29, No 3, July-Sept 1997, Friedman’s name was no longer among the editorial board.

[567] . Unaccountably, some relatively influential observers who evince at least marginal sympathy for Cambodia consider the Nicaragua solution desirable. See Asia Watch’s Sidney Jones, “War and Human Rights in Cambodia”, in NRYB, 19 July 1990, which is discussed above, pp. 362-369.

[568] . Note again the press corps flip-flops on ‘hardline’ and ‘liberal’.

[569] . Real estate was state property from 1975 until 1988, when Phnom Penh residents were given title to the quarters which had been assigned to them, or where they had squatted, after January 1979.

[570] . James Pringle, “Fears of a return to the ‘red way’ in Cambodia”, Bangkok Post, 12 November 1990; Agence France-Presse, “Vietnamese Cadres Weigh ‘Red Solution’ for Cambodia”, The Nation (Bangkok), 13 December 1990. According to Pringle, there is “little concrete to it yet although there are straws in the wind”; “neither Vietnam nor China would welcome planned United Nations-sponsored elections and a UN peace-keeping force here”; “why [quoting a ‘western diplomat’] would Vietnam want its own unhappy population to see free elections next door?”; “Raoul Jennar... said, ‘Cambodia is hesitating between a Western way and a red way to peace’“; “Cambodians do, after all, refer to their adversaries as ‘brother enemy’; and 80 percent of the top leadership of the Phnom Penh regime are themselves former Khmer Rouge, including...Hun Sen...Chea Sim and...Heng Samrin”. Pace Pringle, ‘brother enemy’ is the vocabulary of Nayan Chanda, not the Cambodians, and was probably inspired by Red Brotherhood at War, by Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley; the 80% figure is a serious exaggeration, a propaganda element which has been orchestrated during the past two years by academics and journalists hostile to Phnom Penh. See Vickery, letter to the FEER, published 30 November 1989, and above, pp.369-370.

[571] . Murray Hebert and Tai Ming Cheung, “Comrades again”. FEER 22 August 1991, p. 8.

[572] . Raoul Jennar, “Cambodia: the hardest is still to be done”, “Mission report from 01.10.90 till 02.11.90, to the NGO Forum on Cambodia”, Document RMJ/8, dated 6 November 1990 pp. 10-11.

[573] . John Pedlar, Report on “The Cambodian SNC Meeting, Paris, 21 & 22 December [1990]”, 26 December, typescript.

[574] . This is from an untitled report by Raoul M. Jennar to the NGO Forum in Phnom Penh written after the second Pattaya Conference on 26-30 August 1991.

[575] . Bangkok Post,11 February 1989, p. 6, “Khmer settlement ‘may lead to war’; Nation, 11 February 1989, “Emphasizing agreement and playing down disagreement”, a joint Sino-Soviet nine-point statement on Kampuchea.

[576] . Tom Lansner, “Chain reaction”, FEER, 19 July 1990, pp. 28-29. A red herring was the information given to Lansner that “a major complaint of the officials who tried to launch the Democratic Freedom Party was a secret treaty they claimed made territorial concessions to Vietnam”; and “Intelligence”, Loc. cit., p. 8. This is as weird as Chandler’s assertion, above, note 563, that they wanted to ‘loosen the alliance with Vietnam’. See also Gottesman, pp. 336-350.

[577] . The Nation, 24 June 1994, “Sihanouk and Hun Sen at opposite ends”, translated text of Hun Sen’s letter to Sihanouk concerning Sihanouk’s desire to assume power.

[578] . An example: James Pringle, “Hardliners outflank Hun Sen”, Bangkok Post, 20 October 1990. “In the capital, new official directives seeking to limit contacts between foreigners and Cambodians have been introduced”; Hun Sen “has lost influence internally, according to East European and Soviet envoys”; “In the past six months, Chea Sim has filled most government and party positions with people loyal to him, diplomats here say”; “The hardliners are made nervous by talk of a UN presence, dismantling of their regime, free elections and a multi-party system, they say”. One wonders if Pringle got these ideas from his own research or just from reading Murray Hiebert (above, pp. 385-388). His impressions were contrary to mine in November 1990.

[579] . Nicolas Cummings-Bruce, “Khmer Rouge ignore cease-fire to advance on Cambodia’s capital”, Guardian Weekly 8 July 1990.

[580] . Raoul Jennar, “Cambodia: Which Way to Peace?”, Indochina Issues 91, Washington, D.C., October 1990; “Cambodia: the hardest is still to be done”, Mission Report, 6 November 1990. For examples of Jennar’s influence on journalists see James Pringle, above, “Fears of a return to the ‘red way’ in Cambodia”, Bangkok Post, 12 November 1990, p. 5; and Sue Downie, “Report”, Bangkok Post, 30 November 1990, p. 7.

[581] . It is perhaps this sort of result which has made Kremlinology unpopular in certain circles, as discussed above, pp. 270, ff.

[582] . Stephen Heder, “Recent Developments in Cambodia”, a talk given at the Australian National University, 5 September 1990, printed and distributed by Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge, Washington, D.C., p. 7, was mistaken in writing that after the arrest of people trying to form an independent political party in 1990 “[t]he prominence given to Hun Sen in the official news media suddenly dropped, at the same time that given to Heng Samrin and Chea Sim suddenly rose”. If the newspaper counts are broken down by half-year periods, the relative prominence of all three leaders varies irregularly by semester in all years. In 1990, to the end of November, Hun Sen was featured in Kampuchea 10 times in the first semester and 6 in the second, while Chea Sim’s 16 appearances that year were in the opposite proportion, a statistically insignificant difference. The differences in all years seem related to the duties they perform. Hun Sen gets more attention when foreign affairs, such as international conferences, are important, while Chea Sim dominates the press during sessions of the National Assembly or Front conferences. The arrests occurred in May, but Hun Sen’s activities continued to receive the same attention during the next three months, while Chea Sim’s slight relative predominance is only noticeable from September.

[583] . Chea Sim is reported to have rejoined guerilla forces in Cambodia in 1967, by 1975 had become District Chief of Ponhea Krek, Prey Veng Province, in Region 20, and later became chief of Region 20. See Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 258, 278; and Kiernan, “Wild Chickens, Farm Chickens and Cormorants: Kampuchea’s Eastern Zone Under Pol Pot”, in Chandler and Kiernan, eds. Revolution and Its Aftermath,  p. 167.

[584] . This was related to me by the Australian, Bill Vistarini, in November 1990.

[585] . I attended the press conference, taped it in Khmer, and watched some of the televised portions.

[586] . See above, pp. 388-9. The full story of those events has never been revealed, and in my experience the persons involved are reluctant to talk about it. Their action was inopportune and premature, and suggests that they may have victims of a provocation (see Gottesman, pp. 336-350)

[587]. Stephen, Heder, “Recent Developments”, p. 7, wrote that in 1990 “whereas Hun Sen had previously been very accessible to the foreign press, he was suddenly giving very few interviews”; and Heder related this to an alleged “reigning in of Hun Sen by Chea Sim and his...group”, an inference which I find goes beyond the evidence.

[588]. Reported by Bekaert in “Hun Sen: We’re making progress”, Bangkok Post, 17 November 1988, p. 7. The interview took place in France.

[589]. For examples of Becker’s earlier and recent work see “Cycle of Poverty” and “New Rulers Obscure Role of Party Under Pol Pot”, Washington Post, 28 February-1 March 1983 (and comment  above, pp 189, ff.);”Cambodian Tragedy” [a review of Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea and Michael Vickery, Cambodia, 1975-1982, in Problems of Communism, May-June 1985, pp. 70-73], and When the War Was Over, 1986; and, for the new Becker, “Pol Pot is the Real Killer”, Washington Post, 1 November 1989; “Sihanouk’s Lust for Power Threatens Cambodia”, New York Times, 8 February 1989; “Let the Cambodians vote”, Washington Post, 25 May 1990; and When the War Was Over, second edition, 1998.

[590]. See also Charles Antoine de Nerciat, “Envoy: Phnom Penh receives army aid from Vietnam”, The Nation (Bangkok), 3  March 1990, citing the Soviet Ambassador in Phnom Penh and Cambodian editor Khieu Kanharit for denials that there were Vietnamese combat troops, although there were technicians and advisers (note the headline designed to give an impression contrary to the content of the article); and Jeremy Wagstaff, “Are the Vietnamese troops back in Cambodia”, The Nation (Bangkok), 5 March 1990, citing the usual ‘Western diplomats’ who can only explain SOC military successes in that way.

[591]. A good example is “The new Khmer Rouge policy”, Bangkok Post, 19 March 1991.

[592]. James Pringle, in Bangkok Post, 31 January 1981, p. 8. Charles-Antoine de Nerciat, “The green Khmer Rouge?”, Bangkok Post, 17 February 1991.

[593]. James Pringle, “The double life of Ta Mok”, Bangkok Post, 14 February 1991, p. 5. de Nerciat, op. cit., who also noted the apparent PR character of the Khmer Rouge ‘Green’ program, which appears to be implemented only where it may come to the attention of impressionable outsiders.

[594]. It cannot be excluded that the relative emphasis was the choice of Bangkok Post editors, in which case I hope that Pringle and de Nerciat will respond and denounce the pro-Khmer Rouge use that was made of their work.

[595]. Thayer, “Cambodia: Misperceptions and Peace”, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1991, pp. 181, 190.

[596]. Associated Press, “UN: Khmer resistance using refugees as pawns”, The Nation (Bangkok), 15 January 1991.

[597]. Thayer, “Cambodia: Misperceptions and Peace”.

[598]. Thayer, “A Khmer Ruse”; Elizabeth Becker, Washington Post series, 28 February-1 March, 1983 (see pages 189, ff., above).

[599]. J. Robert Kerrey, “US Still Unwittingly Helps Khmer Rouge”, Christian Science Monitor, World Edition, 31 August 1990-6 September 1990, p. 19.

[600]. My letter, dated 12 September 1990, to the Christian Science Monitor, and a copy of which I sent to Kerrey.

[601]. Indeed, James Pringle, “‘Rampant graft’ hurting image of Hun Sen regime”, Bangkok Post, 21 September 1989, labeled as “leftist-leaning” a foreign relief official who remarked that “We [the western world] complained they were too socialist, so they liberalized the economy, and along with materialism came corruption”.

[602] . This was related to me by the journalist, whom I had accompanied to Saigon, soon after the interview. I do not know whether the interview, with this detail, was published.

[603] . Nitya Pibulsongkram, Thai Ambassador to the United Nations, told the General Assembly, “he was sure that external support for the Kampuchea resistance would stop when Vietnamese forces pull out of Kampuchea” (Bangkok Post, 4 November 1988): and “China pledges to halt aid to Khmer Rouge”, if Vietnamese troops are withdrawn by the second half of 1989, as was agreed in recent talks with the Soviets (Bangkok Post, 30 December 1988).

[604] . FEER, 28 September 1989, pp. 22-23.

[605] . For the blueprint see Susumu Awanohara and Murray Hiebert, “Open door in dispute”, FEER, 25 April 1991, pp. 10-11.

[606] . “Cambodia: an Australian Peace Proposal”, “Working Papers prepared for the Informal Meeting on Cambodia, Jakarta, 26-28 February 1990”, Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, February 1990.

[607] . As a protest against stories of generalized corruption and praise for honest, modest, hard-working civil servants in Phnom Penh see the letter by W. Vistarini, FEER, 30 January 1992, p. 5.

[608] . The Nation, 26 November 1990, p. A10.

[609] . I was first made aware of this by friends who had ‘gone down to the base’, and whom I met in 1988, 1989, and 1991 when the reassessment of Sihanouk was being made. A detailed treatment of this subject is Viviane Frings, “The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and Sihanouk”, JCA, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 1995, pp. 356-363, with a section on the 1992 CPP claim that they represent the continuity from Sihanouk’s Sangkum organization of the 1960s.

[610] . Michael Eiland, “Cambodia in 1985”, p. 121, said 40,000.

[611] . Paisal Sricharatchanya, “On the offensive again”, FEER, 22 September 1988, p. 23.

[612] . Nayan Chanda, “Lethal disclosures”, FEER, 17 November 1988, p. 14.

[613] . Peter Carey, “Prospects for peace in Cambodia” (“The 5th Column”), FEER 22 December 1988, p. 17; other estimates in Murray Hiebert, “The war winds down”, FEER, 12 January 1989, p. 17.

[614] .  Alan Pearce, “Khmer rouge facing hardship, fear and crumbling morale”, The Nation (Bangkok),  27 February 1989. “Cambodian Crisis: Problems of a Settlement and Policy Dilemmas for the United States”, by Robert G. Sutter, Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division, Congressional Research Service, January 27, 1989, p. 13, noting that “these general estimates were confirmed during a telephone conversation with the Department of State in January 1989”, although “precise US government estimates of forces in Cambodia are classified”.

[615] . Paisal Sricharatchanya, “Wait and see”, FEER, 11 May 1989, p. 24.

[616] . Michael Field, Rodney Tasker and Murray Hiebert, “No end in sight”, FEER, 7 September 1989, pp. 14-16; Rodney Tasker and Murray Hiebert, “A test of arms”, FEER, 28 September 1989, p. 21.

[617] . Gary Klintworth, “Hanoi’s role in Cambodia” (“The 5th Column”), FEER, 5 October 1989, p.38.

[618] . Tommy T.B. Koh, “Hanoi’s role in Cambodia” (The 5th Column”), FEER, 26 October 1989, p. 26. See discussion of my correspondence with Koh above, pp. 369-374.

[619] . Rodney Tasker, “Fighting for turf”, FEER, 26 October 1989, p. 36;  Rodney Tasker, “Another Year Zero?”, FEER, 9 November 1989, p. 12; Khatharya Um, “Cambodia in 1988”, AS, Vol. XXIX, No. 1 (January 1989), pp. 73-80; and “Cambodia in 1989”, AS, Vol. XXX, No. 1 (January 1990), pp. 97-104.

[620] . Nayan Chanda, “On the offensive” (“Interview/Hun Sen”), FEER, 7 June 1990, p. 30.

[621] . Rodney Tasker, “What killing fields?”, FEER, 12 September 1991, p. 15.

[622] . “Indochina Digest”, Washington DC, Indochina Project, 28 August 1992, citing Reuters Phnom Penh correspondent Mark Dodd and, for Sihanouk, Le Figaro. “‘The Khmer Rouge: Old Wine in New Wineskin?’,  rough notes from a Talk by Kavi [Chongkitthavorn] and Christophe [Peschoux]”, Aranyaprathet, 13 July 1992, provided by Bob Maat, SJ of Coalition for Peace and Reconciliation; and Christophe Peschoux, Les “nouveaux” Khmers Rouges 1979-1990, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992, pp. 20, 128, 129 “the figure of 35,000 fighters generally accepted since 1980 is to be divided at least by two.... 13-15,000 fighters, with a maximum of perhaps 17,000 seems to me to be closer to reality”, and “I estimate that the number of regular fighters is probably between 10,500 and 14,000 men, with a maximum of perhaps 17,000”, and “a maximum total of 17,000 is possible, but in my opinion improbable”.

[623]   Peschoux, Les “nouveaux” Khmers Rouges 1979-1990, p. 129.

[624] General Michel Loridon commanded the advance UN military mission, UNAMIC, and was replaced in 1992 for trying to push an aggressive policy if the Khmer Rouge did not observe the provisions of Paris. On the Loridon affair see Nayan Chanda, “UN Divisions”, FEER, 23 July 1992, pp. 8-9.

[625] . The Nation, 20 May, 1993, citing a statement by Akashi. Just after the election Victor Mallet reported in the Financial Times, 27 May, that Akashi had claimed the 50% increase in Khmer Rouge forces gave them a total of 15,000, but it is not clear if the 15,000 was in Akashi’s statement, or further clarification obtained by Mallet elsewhere – in fact part of the rewriting on this subject which I am describing. Earlier Jacques Bekaert, “Cambodia Diary”, Bangkok Post, 6 May 1993, had less dramatically reported that the Khmer Rouge had received new weapons and uniforms, supposedly from China. He listed 122mm guns, 120mm mortars, rocket launchers, and possibly some tanks. Other reports on China’s position in 1993 indicate that Chinese aid to the KR had stopped entirely, and if Bekaert’s news was not a red herring, the equipment, including the tanks, had probably been supplied by the Thais, perhaps from the US-Thai strategic stockpile.

[626] . For some of these low estimates, only 8-10,000, see Gary Klintworth, “Cambodia 1992, Hopes Fading”, Southeast Asian Affairs 1993 (Singapore), p. 122. In Mid-1992 the SOC estimate of KR armed forces was 11,800, against KR claims to UNTAC of 27,500 and a reported UN “military intelligence” estimate of between 17,000 and 22,000 (Nate Thayer, “KR Blueprint for the Future Includes Electoral Strategy”, PPP, vol. 1, number 4, 27 August 1992, p. 4).

[627] .  Compare Rodney Tasker, “What killing fields”, FEER 12 September 1991, p. 15, the Khmer Rouge “has only an estimated 35,000 troops, compared with Phnom Penh’s more than 100,000 regular forces”; and Bangkok Post,  6 July 1993, “Inside Indochina”, “Finding an elusive formula for integrating the KR”. They have an army of 10,000 against 40,000 for the Cambodian government armed forces.

[628] . See more detail on this in Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 58-59, and on the UNTAC Information and Education Component (UNTAC 12), see below, passim. A year later the ambassador of an ASEAN country told me he believed that UNTAC 12 was behind the disinformation, but that Akashi was probably aware of it. This ambassador informed his government that there was no new danger.

[629] . “What lies behind KR’s moves”, Heder interview, PPP, 3/10, 20 May-2 June 1994, p. 8.f

[630] . Steve Heder and Judy Ledgerwood, eds., Propaganda, Politics, and Violence in Cambodia [at the time of the 1993 election], Democratic Transition under United Nations Peace-keeping, Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 1996 [cited further as Heder-Ledgerwood], p. 76.

[631] Parts of it were incorporated into Överlever Kambodja ‘Freden’“ [‘Will Cambodia survive the peace?’], Kommentar (Stockholm), Nr 1-2, 1992, pp. 3-13; “Cambodia After the Peace”, Thai-Yunnan Project Newsletter, Canberra, Australian National University, Number Seventeen, June 1992, pp. 3-18; “The Cambodian Economy: Where Has it come from, Where is it going?, in Indochina Economic Reconstruction and International Cooperation, ed. by Tsutomu Murano and Ikuo Takeuchi, Tokyo, Institute of Developing Economies, 1992; and my “Cambodia: a Political Survey”, Discussion Paper No. 14, The Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1994.

[632] . This was written in Penang between visits to Cambodia in late 1991 and the summer of 1992. At the time newspapers from Thailand were not on sale in Penang, possibly, although I could not confirm it, because they were forbidden by the Malaysian authorities. Occasionally those brought in by taxis were confiscated at the border.

[633].”Assassination threat to peace – Sihanouk”, Bangkok Post, 27 January 1992; “Khmer dissident in coma after ‘murder attempt’“, Bangkok Post, 19 March 1992.

[634]. “Bloody clash rocks Khmer peace hopes”, Bangkok Post, 23 December 1991.

[635]. “Sihanouk’s son [Chakrapong, made adviser to Hun Sen] , daughter [Bopha Devi, Deputy Minister of Information and Culture] get top govt posts”, The Nation, 27 December 1991; “Dance-teaching prince [Sihamoni, son of Monique] proposed for UN seat”, The Nation, 8 February 1992; “Sihanouk sons’ [Ranariddh and Chakrapong, of different mothers] armies clash over defections”, Bangkok Post, 18 February 1992; “Sihanouk: My sons don’t like each other”, Bangkok Post, 20 February 1992.

[636]. Robin Davies, “Cambodia experiences a riel contradiction”, Bangkok Post, 6 February 1992. The 1960s parallel to this was the 1963 competition between Sihanouk friend Nhiek Tioulong and Thai businessman Songsakd Kitpanich, each of whom wanted his bank to be the one nationalized under Sihanouk’s new economic plan (innocent foreign economists should take note of Cambodian Capitalism under which a go-getter financier may wish nationalization). Tioulong won, Songsakd was translated almost overnight from insider socialite to crook, and many of those who had been close to him came under suspicion of anything from embezzlement to treason.

[637]. Soon after writing a first draft of this I picked up The Nation of 22 March 1992, and in an article by John Laird, “How to keep the peace”, found “Asia Foundation staff have made several visits to Phnom Penh...offering support for legal and judicial reform in conjunction with a proposal from the US Bar Association for technical assistance to the SNC”. This was amplified for me in Phnom Penh in June 1992 by Khmer-speaking foreigners who had been approached by Asia Foundation to form survey teams to determine how provincial Cambodians would vote in the forthcoming elections. Sensibly they all refused and the project was dropped. One of them, however, was later tempted by the princessly wages offered by UNTAC to take up a position in UNTAC 12, the Information and Education Component, a worthy implementer of traditional Asia Foundation Cambodia policies.

[638] .  “Hun Sen gives Oung sanctuary after bid on life”, The Nation, 30 January 1992.

[639]. This was “Agency for International Development, Cambodia Strategy Document”, March 1991. Although dated before the Paris Agreement, it was circulated among NGOs in Phnom Penh after October 1991.

[640]. “P. Penh police shake down foreigners after curfew”, Bangkok Post, 3 February 1992; “Phnom Penh complains of political banditry”, The Nation, 13 January 1992.  For the journalistic Khmer Rouge chic see Nate Thayer, “Cambodia: Misperceptions and Peace”, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1991; Nate Thayer, “A Khmer Ruse”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 7 March 1991, pp. 25-26. See also footnote 376 above. For details of Thayer’s Khmer Rouge line see Michael Vickery, “The Campaign Against Cambodia: 1990-1991”, Indochina Issues 93.

[641]. See above and below, pp. 301, ff.; note 565.

[642]. For a denunciation of that economics by a professional see “Class that plays for keeps”, an interview with John Kenneth Galbraith, in the Guardian Weekly, 7 June 1992, p. 21, and Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment. And, of course, by 2008, the defects of that type of economics were clear. A pessimistic view specifically of the Cambodian case was Victor Mallet, “Lack of control raises worries over Cambodian ‘free-for-all’“, Bangkok Post, Business, 13 December 1991, “Another fear is that Cambodia...will make the same mistakes as Thailand”, “It’s only a few rich people making money....It is the law of the jungle”. One who may believe in it, and whom we should watch, is L. Gordon Crovitz, the new editor of Far Eastern Economic Review. In Asian Wall Street Journal, 10-11 April 1992, he wrote an article entitled, “Rule of Law”, “Hayek’s Road From Serfdom for Legal U-Turn”, about the work of the recently deceased Friedrich Hayek. Following discussion of Hayek’s work on legal systems, arguing that law must be universal, applicable to those who make it as well as to those who are administered, Crovitz added, “...economic development has been greatest in parts of the world such as Southeast Asia that embraced forms of the British common law...”. Nonsense. Economic development in Southeast, and East, Asia has been most impressive where state control has been strongest, to the extent that one might consider it ‘Stalinist Capitalism’, as in Singapore and the Republic of Korea; and the latest [in 1993-94] high flyer, Malaysia, has distinguished itself by dramatic rejection of the British common law principles with which it started after independence.

[643] . AFP [Sheri Prasso], “Pen Sovann’s return may result in instability”, New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), 10 February 1992.

[644] . “US senators seek ban on KR return”, The Nation, 5 December 1991.

[645] . Nayan Chanda, “Hun Sen Accepted in US as Lobbyist”, Asian Wall Street Journal, 31 March 1992.

[646] . Was Chanda, as suggested by parts of his book Brother Enemy, again being used by Washington. For suggestions of later evolution of US policy in favor of Hun Sen see my Cambodia: A Political Survey.

[647] . Obviously this retrospective observation was not part of the text written in 1992. It does not seem to be easy to get information on the admission of Hun Sen’s son to West Point. None of the prominent journalists writing on Cambodia reported on it at the time; and when in 1997 in Phnom Penh I asked one of the top State Department officers concerned with Cambodia when and how Hun Sen’s son was admitted to West Point, he claimed he didn’t know, an answer which, I submit, severely strains credulity.

[648]. T.D. Allman, Vanity Fair Magazine, April 1990, also cited in Christophe Peschoux, “Enquete sur les ‘nouveaux’ Khmers Rouges (1979-1990), Essai de débroussaillage”, Paris, unpublished 1990, photocopy supplied by the author, p. 17.

[649]. ‘Mit’ Carney was revealed by Heder in his interview with Thiounn Mum, which I quoted without mentioning Carney’s name in “Democratic Kampuchea – CIA to the Rescue”, p. 54, note 34. See Heder’s other writings listed in the bibliographies of my Cambodia 1975-1982, and Kampuchea Politics, Economics, and Society.

[650]. For Heder on Amnesty, see above, pp. 305-330.

[651] . In fact, the trendy line now is that it is not the results, but the electoral exercise in itself which is important. That is, ‘banana republic’ democracy, which prevails in the US too, where, as Noam Chomsky put it, “there is a single major political party with two right wings.”

[652] . “Australia to pull out if attacked”, New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), 12 April 1993; Gareth Evans said “his country will withdraw its peacekeeping force from Cambodia if the Khmer Rouge launched a ‘full frontal assault’ on the United Nations there”. On Evans’ role in the ‘Peace Process’ see Cambodia: a Political Survey, pp. 34-35. Nate Thayer, “KR Vows to Foil UNTAC Election”, PPP 2/8, 2-22 April 1993, pp. 1, 5, wrote that there were serious splits in both FUNCINPEC and BLDP, with strong support for withdrawal following Khmer Rouge persuasion. In particular, “FUNCINPEC’s number two official, Sam Rainsy, favors withdrawal”, prefiguring his positions which usually paralleled the Khmer Rouge line over the next five years. This was confirmed at a small conference in Canberra in October 1993 by one of the highest-placed UNTAC election officials who said, entirely off the record, of course, that the Khmer Rouge nearly succeeded in persuading FUNCINPEC and BLDP to withdraw from the election and resurrect the pre-Paris Agreement Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea.

[653] . In the Angolan presidential election of September 1992 Jonas Savimbi, favored by the US, lost narrowly to President dos Santos, but the latter did not get over 50% of the vote, requiring a second round. Savimbi charged dishonesty, although international observers certified the election as honest. There was neither a recount nor a second round, and Angola lapsed again into civil war. On earlier events in Angola see Stockwell, In Search of Enemies.

[654] . Australia was the country on which hope was pinned, and this was encouraged when in 1988 an Australian foreign service officer was detached and posted in Phnom Penh to oversee Australian aid activities in Cambodia. These hopes were disappointed after Senator Gareth Evans replaced Bill Hayden as Minister of Foreign Affairs in September 1988, starting a switch of Australian policy on Cambodia to the US-ASEAN hard line.

[655] . See below, pp. 436, ff.

[656] . See above, p. 427 on Timothy Carney and Stephen Heder. Another person with similar tendencies who was hired by UNTAC without hesitation was the Norwegian legal expert Hanne Sophie Greve who while working in the border camps became a passionate supporter of the anti-Phnom Penh parties and an opponent of PRK/SOC. In Norway she presented arguments that the PRK/SOC was as bad as DK (www.nkp.no/artikler/2000/02/slaktaren.html ) This was the type of neutral expertise required by UNTAC.

[657] . It was by Thant Mint-U, who has since written an interesting book about his country using standard western writings on Burma together with his personal knowledge of Burma’s elite, both pre-British and modern, Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps A Personal History of Burma. It is very valuable in demonstrating the objective historical circumstances leading to Burma today rather than the ‘bad guys doing bad things’ treatment one sees in most contemporary writing about that country (a real journalistic ‘Burma syndrome’). By 2008 the scenario suggested in 1992 had become ridiculous. A Thai writer in the Bangkok Post (Achara Ashayagachat, “Silence raises questions of relevance”, 13 December 2008), was comparing Thailand to Burma, and complaining about the failure of ASEAN to take a stand on either country, while Cambodia was appearing more stable and better governed than its neighbor, and Hun Sen had become a respected ASEAN diplomat.

[658] .Chia Thye Poh was finally given complete freedom at the end of November 1998 (Bangkok Post, 29 November 1998, p. 4, “The best part of my life was taken away”).

[659] . See Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear, London, Penguin, 1991, extolling her father Aung San’s democratic propensities, and ignoring that everything he said and did indicates that he was a left-wing socialist. For a dissection of the politically correct myths surrounding Aung San Suu Kyi see, Michael A. Aung Thwin, Myth & History in the Historiography of Early Burma, Ohio University, 1998, pp. 155-59. On Sam Sary, see Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 99-100.

[660] . On the Center for Human Rights, see below, pp.551, ff. The last matter is a major theme in several books by Noam Chomsky, and is seen in Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux (Paris, Éditions Raisons d’Agir, avril 1998), p. 76, “La télévision, le journalisme, et la politique”.

[661] . The correspondence among Hawk, Index and myself was between January and December 1986.

[662] . See Michael G. Karnavas, “International trial for KR a bad idea,  S. African-style truth commission is way forward”, PPP, Volume 8 Number 7, 2-12 April, 1999, pp. 10-11; and, especially, “Cambodians can handle a KR trial”, PPP, Volume 8 Number 9, 30 April-13 May, 1999, p. 14. Karnavas is a former Federal and State public defender having practiced criminal defense law at all levels.  In 1994 he trained the Cambodian Defenders and from 1995-6 he worked for the Cambodian Court Training Project of the International Human Rights Group.

[663]. On Pol Pot’s 1992 talk see below, pp. 436, ff. On the projected FUNCINPEC-CPP coalition see Rodney Tasker, “The Odd Couple”, FEER, 28 November 1991, p. 10-11; David Ashley, “The End Justifies the Means?” PPP 4/11, 2-25 June 1995, p. 6, “Within a month of the agreement [Paris Oct 1991] a coalition between CPP and FUNCINPEC had already been signed at Prince Sihanouk’s urging”; Ashley “In Reply”: (to Vickery), PPP 4/14, 14-27 July 1995,  p. 6, “FUNCINPEC and SOC very publicly announced an alliance in November 1991”; and Ashley, “The End”, PPP, 7/8, April 24 - May 7, 1998,” Pol Pot saw the November 1991 alliance of Hun Sen’s CPP and Prince Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC as a US-inspired arrangement to isolate the Khmer Rouge and prevent the CPP’s collapse”.  For the text of the CPP-FUNCINPEC agreement see David Ashley, “Between war and peace: Cambodia 1991-1998”, Conciliation Resources, London. November 1998 

[664] See Trevor Findlay, Cambodia the Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC, Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 24; and my review of it and Timothy Carney and Tan Lian Choo, Whither Cambodia? Beyond the Election, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (September 1995), pp. 439-443. Findlay quaintly remarked that “Sihanouk and Hun Sen shelved their plans for a coalition government by early December”.

[665] . See Steve Heder, “The Resumption of Armed Struggle by the Party of Democratic Kampuchea: Evidence from National Army of Democratic Kampuchea ‘Self-Demobilizers’”, chapter 3 in Heder-Ledgerwood. See further below, pp. 500, ff.

[666] . On Sin Song and Sar Kheng see below, pp. 493-494.

[667] . This was not part of the original paper for Redd Barna, but it is appropriateto insert it here, where I have only summarized the main points.

[668] . Reuters’ Mark Dodd gave me a copy of the hand-written 38-page Khmer text on 10 December. On the Loridon affair see Nayan Chanda, “UN Divisions”, FEER, 23 July 1992, pp. 8-9.

[669] . “‘K.Rouge wants to open battlefield in P. Penh’“, Bangkok Post, 10 December 1992. “‘Dated February 6...it appears to be a directive to young Khmer Rouge diplomats from the radical faction’s Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, according to Ben Kiernan, a Cambodia scholar at Yale University...who examined it...[t]his is typical of Khmer Rouge language,’ he said, ‘It’s background for [their] people speaking out to the rest of the world’....”; “Khmer Rouge plans battlefield in Phnom Penh”, The Nation, 10 December 1992, “Secret document quotes Pol Pot”, following a report from FEER, which attributed the document correctly to Pol Pot. The authenticity of this document was accepted by Timothy Carney in Timothy Carney and Tan Lian Choo, Whither Cambodia? Beyond the Election, Singapore, ISEAS, 1993, p. 35, “On my reading of it, and every other Cambodian specialists [sic] who looked at it, it was Pol Pot talking to senior leadership circles”. Kiernan, in, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences”, pp. 233-234, persisted, against all internal evidence, in attributing this document to Ieng Sary.

[670] . As late as the second edition of How Pol Pot (2004), p. 220, Kiernan still said Pol Pot “has never explicitly conceded that [the visit to China] occurred”. It is peculiar that neither Kiernan nor Chandler knew of this text in time to correct the misapprehension in their work that Pol Pot had never admitted his tip to China. See also below, p. 472.

[671] . Ayutthaya was the capital of the country now called ‘Thailand’ from the 14th century to 1767. The Lue are a Tai-speaking people of northern Laos and an adjoining area of southern China, with their traditional capital in Chiang Rung/Hung. A description of their political system is in Jacques Lemoine, “Tai Lue Historical Relation with China and the Shaping of the Sipsong Panna Politi­cal System”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Thai Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, 3-6 July 1987, pp. 121-34, see p. 122.

[672] . E. Luro, Le pays d’Annam, Paris, 1897, p. 95.

[673] . Robert K. Headley, Jr., Cambodian-English Dictionary, Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1977, Vol. I, p. 168, identifies the four as “the four highest ministers in the Khmer government (ministers of Justice, Interior, Navy and War)”. The difference may indicate that in Cambodian practice the designation was less definite, and less meaningful, perhaps because Cambodian administration had been less influenced by China.

[674] . See Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, Harvard University Asia Center, 1988

[675] . Stephen Russell Heder, “Pol Pot at Bay: People’s War and the Breakdown of the 1991 Paris Agreements”, Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999, where Pol Pot’s talk is entitled “Clarification of Certain Principled Views to Act as the Basis of Our Views and Stance”, 6 February 1992.

[676] . Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia, p. 70.

[677] . For ‘Pen Sovann regime’ see Stephen R. Heder, ‘From Pol Pot to Pen Sovann to the Villages’, paper presented at the International conference on Indochina and Problems of Security in Southeast Asia, Bangkok, Chulalongkorn University; and for discussion Vickery, Kampuchea Politics, Economics, and Society, pp. 45-7.

[678] . Nate Thayer, PPP, 3/2, 28 Jan-10 Feb 1994.

[679] . Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 99, citing reports by Stephen Heder.

[680] . See, for example, a paper I gave in Canberra in November 1993, published in early 1994 as “Cambodia: A Political Survey” [expanded in 2007 as Cambodia: A Political Survey]; Akashi’s remarks from The Nation, Bangkok, 20 May, 1993.

[681] . Nate Thayer, “KR Blueprint for the Future Includes Electoral Strategy”, PPP, 1/4, 27 August 1992; Jacques Bekaert, “The Khmer Rouge’s Dangerous Game”, Bangkok Post, 5 December 1992; Kavi Chongkittavorn, “Tokyo talks clouded with uncertainty”, The Nation, 20 June 1992.

[682] . Nate Thayer, “Split formalized as KR declare ‘govt’“, PPP, 3/14, 15-28 July 1994, p. 11.

[683] . Becker, When the War Was Over (first edition), pp. 447-448, removed from second edition; Stephen R. Heder, “Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot: Moloch’s Poodle”, p. 7, printed for distribution by Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge, Washington DC. The same detail was included in Steve Heder, “Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan: Moloch’s Poodle”, paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, New Orleans, 1991, p. 20. Serge Thion, “The Cambodian Idea of Revolution”, in Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and its Aftermath, p. 30, and reprinted in Serge Thion, Watching Cambodia, Bangkok, White Lotus, 1993, p. 93. In that publication Thion did not identify his source, but he later told me that it was Laurence Picq who had been with the remnants of the DK Foreign Ministry on the Thai border, and who said the information about Son Sen was common knowledge. Picq was author of Au delà du ciel cinq ans chez les Khmers Rouges, about her experiences in 1975-1979 within the DK Foreign Ministry as wife of Ieng Sary’s close colleague Suong Sikoeun.  In 1983, however, an Australian military officer who had worked in Thailand told me that the Thai considered Son Sen to be the upcoming power figure among the KR.

[684] . Heder-Ledgerwood, p. 73.

[685] . Michael Vickery, “Cambodia: A Political Survey”, Australian National University, 1994. I presented the paper on 5 November 1993, although it was not printed for distribution until several months later, but when I visited Phnom Penh in December 1993, I discovered that some journalists had heard of it. It was expanded in Cambodia: A Political Survey, Phnom Penh, Funan Press, 2007.

[686] . Whatever the truth of the various interpretations of Son Sen’s position, he came to a bad end because of disagreement with Pol Pot. Sen and his entire family were murdered in 1997 during the splits among Khmer Rouge leaders. Some knowledgeable Khmers now (2008) believe that he was killed for trying to negotiate with Phnom Penh.

[687]   The original Operation California in Cambodia was a private initiative in 1979-1980 to bring medical and food aid directly to the new PRK in Phnom Penh, and in the face of US regime disapproval. They continued to provide aid to Cambodia and other disaster areas, and in 1988, began using Operation USA as their corporate name.

[688] For more detail on the ridiculous pretensions of these parties and their ignorance of the situation within Cambodia, see Chantou Boua, “Development Aid and Democracy in Cambodia”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, ed. By Ben Kiernan, Monograph Series 41/Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, New Haven, 1993, pp. 273-283.

[689] . I have written ‘middle class’ because there is no middle class in the sense of that term in the capitalist West. Most of the persons concerned were state employees, and some small business persons, all of whom should be called ‘petty bourgeoisie’.

[690] . See discussion above, pp. 410-411, about PRK officials ‘going down to the base’. Sihanouk named his political organization and government the Sangkum reastrniyum, which he translated as ‘People’s Socialist Community’, although no term in the original Khmer means, or implies, socialism. ‘Socialism’, however, was the buzzword of the time, even for populist authoritarian rulers such as Sihanouk.

[691] . Nate Thayer, “Guerilla fund-fare”, FEER, 7 February 1991.

[692] . Probably few but specialists realize that several formulae have been used in democratic countries to calculate proportional results, and no questions were raised about this in 1993, but it became a burning issue after the 1998 election. In brief, never are the results based on strict proportionality because of the remainders when the number of seats available is divided by the percentage of votes obtained by each party. The main difference among the several formulae which have been used is whether the calculations should favor the maximum entry into parliament of small parties, which leads to unstable governments, or should favor the inclusion of only the largest parties. The choice of formula is always a political choice, and UNTAC in 1993 opted for a formula which in principle favored the maximum number of parties, but failed in its purpose because the Cambodian voters preferred the well-known larger parties. For the formula problem after the 1998 election see Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 172-174.

[693] . Raoul Jennar reported on Hun Sen’s objection to proportional representation at the Pattaya II conference in August 1991, and said that “Prince Sihanouk expresses the same point of view” (Raoul M. Jennar, untitled and undated report to the NGO Forum written after the Pattaya II conference). See also “Cambodia, All set to sign”, FEER 3 October 1991, p. 12. It is not certain that Hun Sen’s international opponents wanted too strong a showing by FUNCINPEC either. In particular, the US did not want a dominant Sihanouk, and probably would have preferred a strong bloc of the former KPNLF parties, with support from FUNCINPEC and the emigré parties.

[694] . David P. Chandler with Ben Kiernan and Muy Hong Lim, “The Early Phases of Liberation in Northwestern Cambodia: Conversations with Peang Sophi”, No. 10, Working Papers, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, November 1976. Reprinted in Kiernan and Boua, eds. Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942-1981, pp. 318-329.

[695] . Chandler, “Chomsky holds fast to error”, The Australian, 20 January 1995; and Chomsky’s answer, “No glossing over the truth of Pol Pot’s barbarities”, The Australian, 15 February 1995, from which I have quoted Chandler’s letter to Chomsky dated 27 November 1978. For another right-wing attack on Chomsky during his Australia visit see Robert Manne’s column in The Age (Melbourne), 15 January 1995. For the new Vietnamese ‘protectorate’ see Chandler, A History, p. 248.

[696] . Chandler’s “Epitaph” was in New Left Review 205, May-June 1994, pp. 87-99; my answer was sent to them in August 1995.

[697] . In recommending my treatment of deaths in Democratic Kampuchea to his readers (Chandler’s footnote 1) and at the same time calling the situation ‘apocalyptic’, Chandler breaks contact between his sources and his analysis. A point of detail, although  not of great historical importance, is Chandler’s statistical summary, p. 87, that under Pol Pot “over a million Cambodians...died from malnutrition, overwork or untreated illnesses...At least a hundred thousand more were summarily executed...”. This does not agree with any other estimates. My own has been that there were roughly 700,000 deaths above a normal peacetime total, and that possibly half were executions, although I now feel that estimate for the number of executions might be lowered.

[698] . The NYRB, 10 May 1984, to which I wrote an answer, unpublished, on 29 May 1984 [see above, pp. 145, ff.]. Chandler’s letter to NYRB, dated 5 June 1984, was against the pretension of the article as a whole, and Shawcross’s misuse of evidence, not against the point I am raising here.

[699] . Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, pp. 149, 138.

[700] . William Shawcross, “The End of Cambodia?”, NYRB,  24 January 1980.

[701] . William Shawcross, “Cambodia: some Perceptions of a Disaster”, in Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and its Aftermath, pp. 230-1, 250-2; Chandler, Tragedy, p. 285.

[702] . Chandler, Tragedy, p. 261.

[703] . On the position of the CIA with respect to propaganda on Khmer Rouge killings, see Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”.

[704] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, p. 97; Tragedy, p. 75; Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, p. 198.

[705] . Chandler has now switched, apparently, and wishes to blame Vietnam for dragging Cambodia into the war from as early as 1963, rather than as here, trying to discourage a Cambodian revolution as late as the mid-1960s (see below, note 738).

[706] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, p. 96; Chandler, Brother Number One, first edition, p. 140, second edition, p. 133; Tragedy, p. 168, and note 31, p. 347; Heder, “Origins of the Conflict”, Southeast Asia Chronicle [in Chandler cited erroneously as ‘Indo-China Chronicle’], 64 (September-October 1978), pp. 3-18.

[707] . Chandler, Tragedy, pp. 256-57.

[708] . Heder, “Origins of the Conflict”, p. 18; discussion in Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 194-195.

[709] . See Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 195-96, and footnotes.

[710] . The FEER article, dated 19 August 1977, was by Nayan Chanda. Apparently, based on an appendix to Heder’s article, “The Border Dispute on the Seas”, by L.F. [Lowell Finley ?], pp. 39-40, the only Vietnamese agreement to use of the Brevié line was in 1976, but only “to determine sovereignty over the islands, but not...as a border on the sea itself”.

[711] . The 1967 border agreement was published in English by Vietnam in Kampuchea Dossier I, Hanoi, Vietnam Courier, 1978, pp. 123-4; and in French in Jean Morice, Cambodge du sourire à l’horreur, pp. 168-70.

[712] . Of course, if the DK attacks on southern Vietnam in 1977 had succeeded in complete conquest of the southern tip of Vietnam, Vietnamese claims to the 200-mile economic zone would no longer have impinged on the area traditionally claimed by Cambodia. There is so far no evidence that such was the plan of the central DK authorities, even ‘in Pol Pot’s mind’, but some of the DK soldiers involved had been told by local superiors that the objective was reconquest of the lost provinces of Kampuchea Krom.

[713] . See, for example, the letter from Jeldres in FEER, 3 October 1981, pp. 3-4. [Jeldres is now, see below, a ‘Research Fellow’ at Monash University’s Asia Institute, Chandler’s academic home base. For documentation of his pro-Pinochet position see Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick (USA) and London, 2007, pp. 229-230.]

[714] . All of this had been studied in detail in Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982 [published 1984], Kampuchea Politics Economics and Society, London, Frances Pinter Publishers, 1986, several articles, which Chandler is on record as approving, and latest, Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 20-30.

[715] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, p. 99.

[716] . See above, “Pol Pot’s Plan for UNTAC”, pp. 436, ff. Pol Pot was obviously obsessed by Loridon, whose name appears more frequently than any other but Sihanouk in the 1992 talk. Whoever decided on Loridon’s removal did a great favor to the Khmer Rouge.

[717] . Chandler, Tragedy, p. 54-55; and on the relevance of Yugoslavia see Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982, pp. 275-280.

[718] . Brother Number One, first edition, p. 41, second edition, p. 39.

[719] . “Epitaph”, p. 91; François [miscited by Chandler as ‘Michel’] Debré, Cambodge La Révolution de la forêt, [Paris], Flammarion, 1976, p. 86; Tragedy, p. 54.

[720] . Brother Number One, first edition, p. 36, second edition, p. 34.

[721] . Ben Kiernan, Review of David Chandler, Brother Number One, in The Journal of Asian Studies 52/4 (November 1993), p. 1077, with reference to p. 121 in Kiernan, How Pol Pot, London, Verso, 1985.

[722] . Kiernan, How Pol Pot, pp. 220, 222; Chandler, Brother Number One, first edition, p. 76, second edition, p. 72. See also Chandler, Tragedy, p. 148, “Pol Pot has never mentioned the visits [to China and Korea]; neither have Chinese documents”, where Chandler does not speculate on whom Pol Pot may have met. Engelbert and Goscha, Falling Out of Touch, assert that those meetings occurred, but relying, apparently, p. 77, n. 96, on the speculations of Kiernan and Chandler.

[723] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, p. 92.

[724] . On Pol Pot’s February 1992 talk see above, “Pol Pot’s Plan for UNTAC”, pp. 436, ff.

[725] Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China, A History of the People’s Republic, New York, Free Press, 1977, pp. 267, 310-11, 122, 137, 147-48 respectively; and for the last remark about Li, Jean Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1974, p. 259.                  

[726] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, pp. 92, 89, 94, 95 respectively. In his attempt to blacken all communist movements by imputing their excesses to mutual influences Chandler seems to have partly lost control of his sources.

[727] . Chandler, “Epitaph”, p. 95.

[728] . New Left Review 205,  p. 2, editor’s comment,  in “Themes”.

[729] . See the conclusion of the present text of the article.

[730] . See note 753 below. For Heder’s position in 1979 see “Interview with Southeast Asian scholars [Steven R. Heder and George C. Hildebrand], A close-up look at Vietnam’s invasion of Kampuchea”, The Call, New York, 5 March 1979, in which Heder and Hildebrand took strong pro-DK and anti-Viet Nam positions.

[731] . Published in “The Third International Conference on Kampuchea, 25-26 July, 1987, Bangkok, Thailand”, Department of Press and Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, August 1987. See comment on this above, note 553.

[732] . Blackburn’s letter was dated 12 September 1995. It is interesting that the first reaction to Chandler’s article, at least the first, and only one, I have seen, was a Swedish translation in Kampuchea, Nr 1/95 published by the Kambodjaföreningen i Sverige (‘Cambodia association in Sweden’), deriving from the associates of Jan Myrdal who visited Democratic Kampuchea in 1978.

[733] . The Nation (Bangkok), 16 July 1994, p. A7. Title supplied by the editor; also sent on July 8 to Bangkok Post and PPP; footnotes have been inserted later.

[734] . See The Nation, 10 June 1994, “Indochinese journalists learn how to invert the pyramid”, “AP’s Peter Eng writes about a course designed to give reporters a taste of Western press styles and freedoms”; and Bangkok Post, 14 June 1994, “Indochinese journalists train in Bangkok”. Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, “Dispatch”, Bangkok, Thailand, Volume 1, Number 2, November 1994, p. [4], “IMMF’s first training course builds Indochina bridges”, “Significant funding from The Asia Foundation and the Freedom  Forum made possible IMMF’s first training...”.

[735] . See examples above, 220, 224 in the review of Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy. A more recent blatant example with another, transparently propagandistic and political, purpose in mind was “EU Media guru says Ranariddh guilty”, by Mathew Grainger, PPP, Vol 7, No, 2, 30 January-12 February 1998, p. 2. At the time Raoul Jennar, the object of the title, had no EU position, and he had not said Ranariddh was ‘guilty’, only that it was an established fact that he had negotiated with the Khmer Rouge. The purpose of the article was to create a scandal which would prevent Jennar from getting the EU position for which he was intended; and that purpose was achieved.

[736] . See below pp. 540, 562-3.

[737] See Nate Thayer, “Sihanouk Back at the Helm”, Phnom Penh Post, 2/13, 18 June-1 July 1993, and “Surface Calm, Power-sharing pact brings little change”, FEER 8 July 1993. Thayer’s ‘UN’ version of the secession was written by Stephen Heder of the Information and Education Component. The journalist who took note of my alternative version when it was issued was Sherri Prasso, of Agence France Presse, in The Nation (Bangkok), 26 June 1993, AFP, “Americans [Vickery and Heder] debate Cambodia secession”.  My version was published in  “Cambodia: a Political Survey”, Discussion Paper No. 14, The Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1994, and in Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 92-100. Interestingly, when Heder’s UNTAC superior, Timothy Carney, took note of this matter in a published conference presentation only a couple of months after the election, he implicitly rejected Heder’s interpretation, which at the time he himself had signed before its distribution, and passed the matter off as a controversy between Nate Thayer and myself. See my joint review of the books by (1) Trevor Findlay, Cambodia the Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC, and (2) Timothy Carney and Tan Lian Choo, Whither Cambodia? Beyond the Election, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (September 1995), pp. 439-443. Another interesting implicit rejection of Heder’s analysis, a feint with damned praise, if this pun may be excused, is to be found in a particularly tendentious, even disinformative, article about the Cambodian elections of 1993 and 1998 by John M. [General] Sanderson and Michael Maley (“Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 52/3, 1998, pp. 241-253), where, p. 248, note 13, they refer to Heder, “the distinguished Cambodia scholar and our former UNTAC colleague”, but when attributing blame for the 1993 secession (p. 243, note 3) they “deliberately refer here to the CPP hierarchy, rather than to Hun Sen personally”, because “the events of the secession were related to factional differences within the CPP, and the precise roles played by the various CPP actors (and by Prince Sihanouk [emphasis added; see my article]) are difficult to evaluate”.  This constitutes a total rejection of Heder’s interpretation of the secession.

     A more intemperate rejection by Sanderson of another Heder fantasy, provided to David Roberts during his investigation of the conflict between UNTAC and the Khmer Rouge before the 1993 election, concerned Heder’s very peculiar interpretation of the Loridon affair (see above note 674, and Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia p. 70). Perhaps, finally, Heder should be regarded as the least credible of all Cambodia specialists. Even those operatives for whose projects Heder’s work provided support, and who were happy to use him until his credibility was blown, finally backed away.

[738] . “From beyond the grave”, The Scotsman (Glasgow), 14 December 1992, and “A New Cambodia”, NYRB 12 August 1993, pp. 37-41, see p. 38. However, if Grant Evans’s reading of Shawcross is correct (see p. 114 above), this apparent about-face of Shawcross may be just the surface manifestation of a deep-structured continuity.

[739] . Shawcross, FEER 2 January 1976, pp. 9-10; above, p. 113-114.

[740] . Chandler, about whose book Shawcross was writing, has also moved steadily rightward, and now agrees with Shawcross’ position, and moreover, that “it’s time to say that Vietnam drew Cambodia into the war from 1963 onwards and that US actions were in response to this”, as quoted by Grant Peck, AP, “America’s role in Cambodia still a hot issue”, The Nation (Bangkok), 12 April 2000, Part two of a series. Peck was contrasting those who say it was US actions which drew Cambodia into the war and that US bombing contributed to genocidal fanaticism of the KR, and those who claim the KR already had a radical agenda, including “David Chandler, one of the leading western scholars on modern Cambodia”. Because this is contrary to everything Chandler, or the other leading historian of the period, Ben Kiernan, has written, and who have maintained that until Sihanouk was overthrown by Lon Nol in 1970 the Vietnamese urged strongly that the Cambodian communists not get into an armed revolt (See above, p.465, Chandler’s “Epitaph”; Chandler, A History, third edition, pp. 198, 202, fourth edition, pp. 242, 246; Chandler, Tragedy, p. 147), I doubted the accuracy of Peck’s report and queried Chandler, who responded, “I have always written that without the VN war the Khmer Rouge would never have existed, and that without Vietnamese help they would not have won the war against Lon Nol. I am surprised that I dated Vietnamese pulling Cambodia into the war as early as 1963, because the agreements between North Vietnam and Sihanouk to station Vietnamese troops in Cambodia date as I remember from 1964 or 1965 [Chandler, A History, fourth edition, pp. 236-7, says ‘1966’], but were linked to his break with the United States, which began in 1963. The Lon Nol coup released the Vietnamese from their agreement not to attack the Cambodian government, but the troops that attacked the Cambodian government (in response to its hostility to be sure) were already in Cambodia and had been there for several years”. This is typical Chandlerian ground-shifting. The proposition that without the VN war the Khmer Rouge would never have existed is here a Chandler smokescreen.  The historical discussions (by Chandler, Kiernan, and others) about the ‘drawing’ of Cambodia into the war by the Vietnamese in the 1960s or earlier, have not turned on Sihanouk’s agreements with the government of North Vietnam, and the ensuing permission for their troops to use sanctuaries along the border (not station troops throughout the  country). Moreover, those agreements, from the Vietnamese side, were to keep Cambodia neutral, not ‘draw’ it into the war. The Vietnamese communists also desired a peaceful Cambodia, and, as Chandler has accurately written in the three contexts noted above, refused to countenance Pol Pot’s desire to start revolutionary warfare against Sihanouk in the 1960s, greatly distressing Pol Pot. Everything known about events of the time support the interpretation that the Vietnamese wished to keep Cambodia out of the war until after 1970 that was no longer possible. In fact, even then they offered Lon Nol the same deal they had made with Sihanouk. Against Vietnamese advice, the Cambodian communists began armed struggle in 1968, continuing with more strength in 1969, and with increasing popular support after Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970. But what really ‘drew’ Cambodia completely into the Vietnam war was the joint US and South Vietnamese invasion against the communists in 1970, which pushed the Vietnamese troops from their border sanctuaries deep into the country. Contrary to Chandler’s fantasy that US moves were a reaction to Vietnam’s activities in Cambodia, it was the 1970 US aggression which enabled the Vietnamese, supporting the Cambodian communists, to occupy most of Cambodia by the end of 1970. The Viet forces were important in 1970-71, but by 1972 Khmer Republic troops returning from the Chenla campaigns knew they had been fighting other Khmer, not Vietnamese; and by 1973 Vietnamese troops were gone. The Khmer Rouge then went on to take Phnom Penh on their own in 1975. Chandler’s remark to Peck and his subsequent explanation to me are typical of Chandler’s ideological shifts in recent years, and which in this case represent distortion of history.

[741] . Would Shawcross also accept that those who opposed Russian intervention in Afghanistan, including himself, should now be ‘humbled’ by the scale of suffering inflicted there by the non-Communist victors, whose strength to inflict suffering was a direct result of US aid?

[742] . Shawcross’ father, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was once teased as ‘Sir Hartley Floorcross’ for voting against his own Labor Party.

[743] . Speech in Stourbridge, March 16th, 1984. See www.usenet.com/newsgroups/talk.politics.theory/msg00404.html. That speech is also a favorite on the Hitler-doting www.adolfthegreat.com and the anti-Jewish www.biblebelievers.org.au . Now we understand why the younger Floorcross dislikes comparison of the Khmer Rouge with Nazis.

[744] . Sympathy for fascism and the Nazis as allies against resurgent Russia was current in US elite circles well into the 1930s. See Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, pp. 20-21.

[745] . Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; Heder-Ledgerwood.

[746] . See more on this book below, pp. 500, ff. (note 713).

[747] . Although Rainsy in the end voted for it. See also Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, p. 136, n. 151.

[748] . PPP, 5/10, 20 September-3 October 1996, “Ranariddh dismisses rumored CPP scheme”, and interview with Matthew Grainger, “Ranariddh: ‘KR will be very tough’“. The same theme was implicit in the formation of the ‘National Union Front’ of FUNCINPEC and Sam Rainsy’s ‘Khmer Nation Party’, with participation in the celebration by 20 Khmer Rouge delegates from Ieng Sary’s ‘Democratic National Union Movement’. See Ker Munthit, “Smiles all round as one-time foes join hands in NUF”, PPP 6/5, March 7-20, 1997, p. 4.

[749] This worst case did not come about, because of further KR splits and defections.

[750] . Note again (above, note 738) that this interpretation of Viet Nam ‘dragging’ Cambodia into the war, and even as early as 1963, has been repeated by David Chandler.

[751] See above, p. 305, on Amnesty’s Cambodia reporting.

[752] . See further below, pp. 507-510. Heder-Ledgerwood, p. 220.

[753] . Things like this have always brought quick death to journalists in neighboring Thailand, the favorite Southeast Asian capitalist country of the US, without the foreign press getting excited. It was much worse in Thailand some years ago, when murders of journalists were annually in the two-figure range. A relatively recent case was highlighted by the Thai Human Rights Lawyer Thongbai Thongpao in Bangkok Post, “Commentary”, p. 7, 18 January 1998, “Time to fight state enemies”. A few days earlier a provincial reporter for two Thai-language dailies was shot dead, and Mr. Thongbai wrote that “the murder...teaches an important lesson to other news reporters – that if they perform their duties the [same] way... the same fate awaits them.... All parties concerned [Minister of Interior, Police, public] viewed the murder in the same way... that Mr. Sayomchai was killed because he was reporting news that affected the interests of some influential people.... the main cause that led to his death is undoubtedly corruption”. Mr. Thongbai continued, “last year some [six] members of [a sub-district administrative body] were killed at the [sic!, a] meeting.... because they tried to obstruct the corrupt administration and voted to oust the corrupt chairman”. Typically in such cases in Thailand the guilty are never caught, or if caught and tried, serve very lenient sentences.

[754] . Thayer, “Medellin”, FEER, 23 November 1995, and Fawthrop, “Smoke but no gun in P.Penh”, The Nation, Bangkok, 21 April 1996. This view of the drug law was expressed to me at the time by two American lawyers working in Phnom Penh, Brad Adams and Evan Gottesman, of whom the former has since become famous for anti-CPP, anti-Hun Sen, views, while the latter has published an interesting, and also anti-CPP book, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge (see further below, pp. 568, ff.). For more on the drug law see PPP 5/12, 14-27 June 1996. And if journalists want to attack Cambodia as a drug center, they should perhaps start with themselves. In a story in Soldier of Fortune, “Hell on the Ho Chi Minh Trail”, August 1994, pp. 54-59, Robert K. Brown & Robert MacKenzie, wrote the following:  On their arrival in Phnom Penh Nate Thayer said, “Welcome to the freest country in the world!” Then Thayer showed them his collection of weapons, and “As if to reinforce his assertion, Thayer rolled and lit up a joint, continuing, ‘Anything you want. You can get a 50-kilo bale of pot at the market’”; “Thayer’s prior planning [for their expedition] primarily consisted of drinking, smoking and banging the local bimbos”.

[755] Statement by Heder on US Policy in Indochina to Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, 21 Oct 1981.

[756] Keith Richburg, “Timing of Khmer Rouge Defections Suggests Possible Role by China”, Washington Post 24 Aug 1996, p. A18.

[757] .   See below, p. 504.

[758]   See above, p.  415, and Nayan Chanda, “UN Divisions”, FEER, 23 July 1992, pp. 8-9.

[759] See Akashi May 1993, and my “Son Sen and All That”, PPP 29 Nov-12 Dec 1996, reprinted above, pp. 441, ff.

[760] For the details see “Revisiting the legalities of ‘93’”, PPP vol. 7, no. 10, 22 May-4 June 1998; and Vickery, Cambodia a Political Survey, pp. 79-81.

[761] Reported by Raoul Jennar, “Cambodian Chronicles X”, 29 June 1993.

[762] Responsibility for pre-election violence in 1992-93 has never been adequately explained. Not only were Sar Kheng and Sin Song implicitly exonerated by their invitations to the US, but the clear split between Hun Sen and Sin Song right after the election meant that he was no longer useful for anti-Hun Sen propaganda, a situation made even more certain by his involvement in the coup plot in July 1994 (see PPP 3/14, 15-28 July 1994), while by 1994 Sar Kheng was being treated  by foreign journalists and diplomats as one of Cambodia’s ‘Great White Hopes’ for Democracy against the ‘dictatorial’ Hun Sen. An Asian diplomat with long experience in Cambodia told me that he believed the pre-election violence, to the extent it was centrally planned, had  been organized by a third person, whom he knew rather well. See Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 132-133.

[763] . Weirdest of all is David Chandler’s suggestion that DK was like Ceausescu’s Romania (Chandler, A History, third edition, p. 231, removed from fourth edition.), which exhibits absolute and unnecessary ignorance of that country, whether under Stalinism, post-Stalinism, or during 1990s-present ersatz capitalist democracy. This bit of reverse intellectual history is another of Chandler’s loose cannonballs. Romania under Ceausescu’s early years was in every respect (education, health care, nutrition, working conditions, social freedoms) the opposite of Democratic Kampuchea, and comparable to Western Europe, as I saw on three visits in 1969, 1970, and 1972. A fourth visit took place twenty years later in 1991. Chandler also, in the careless hodgepodge of his book’s final chapter, p. 245, says that Pol Pot favored “Leninist politics”, an example of the perverse use of anti-DK critique noted by Edward Herman (note 108 above).

[764] . NYRB 27 Sept 1984; BCAS 18/1, Jan-March 1986.

[765] . See Heder on the same subject below, and a switch by Shawcross, p. 500.

[766] . See again, for Heder’s position in 1979, “Interview with Southeast Asian scholars [Steven R. Heder and George C. Hildebrand], A close-up look at Vietnam’s invasion of Kampuchea”, The Call, New York, 5 March 1979, in which Heder and Hildebrand took strong pro-DK and anti-Viet Nam positions.

[767] . The conference was “Cambodia: Power, Myth and Memory”, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 11-13 December 1996, from notes of a participant. From my own research I can confirm that there was no lack of Cambodians who strongly desired to return after April 1975 and that persuasion was not required.

[768] . Keith Richburg, “Timing of Khmer Rouge Defections Suggests Possible Role by China”, Washington Post, 24 Aug 1996, p. A18.

[769] . See PPP no. 5/23, 15-28 Nov 1996, p. 7. In 1984 Heder was putting out a different line, “If Pol Pot and his former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, were to disappear, the changes in Khmer Rouge policy would be more credible”, implicitly treating Ieng Sary as number 2 in an article in which there was no mention of any other Khmer Rouge leaders (Steve Heder and Ben Kiernan, in separate sections, “Why Pol Pot? Roots of the Cambodian Tragedy”, Indochina Issues 52, December 1984, p. 7).

[770] . See Thayer, “New govt: who’s really in control”, PPP, vol. 2. no. 24, 19 November-2 December 1993; Thayer, “Fury over Sin Song’s trip to US”, PPP vol. 3, no. 3, 11-24 February 1994, and PPP 3/14, 15-28 July 1994.

[771] . This was Brad Adams, who expressed this opinion to me in Phnom Penh in December 1996, but who has developed into one of the noisiest critics of the Hun Sen-led government, by default giving support, in 1998, to Rainsy. Another interesting item was his agreement with me on the shocking behavior of IRI in bringing an El Salvadoran ARENA party leader to Cambodia (see p. 540 below).

[772] . George Coedès was the leading French scholar of Cambodian epigraphy, both Sanskrit and Khmer, and author of a famous general history of ancient Southeast Asia; Richard Winstedt was a British official in Malaya and scholar of Malay literature and history; Paul Mus, who grew up in Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s, is famous for scholarship on Buddhism, Sanskrit literature, the Cham, and Vietnamese society; and John Furnivall, a British official in Burma, produced some of the best work on the society and economy of that country. 

[773] . See above, pp.  308-330; In 1979-80 Heder was  financed by the State  Department to do research in the Cambodian refugee camps (see the bibliography of his research results, and my comments, in Cambodia 1975-1982, chapter 4); he then summarized his conclusions in, “Statement by Stephen R. Heder, Ph.D. Candidate, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs on US Policy in the Indochina Region Since Vietnam’s Occupation of Kampuchea”, Wednesday, October 21, 1981; and parlayed this into participation in the Lawyers’ Committee propaganda report and several years work for Amnesty.

[774] Poor Carney seems to be suffering generally from refusal to credit his roles in foreign policy achievements. In Time 23 December 1996 (Asian edition subscription copy), p. 27, “Bail Bondsman to the World”, about Congressman Bill Richardson’s rescue of three Red Cross workers from Sudanese guerrillas, a picture shows five men, two caucasians and two Africans seated around a table and nine Africans standing behind them. Richardson is seated second from right, with the Sudanese commander on his right, and on the far left is the other caucasian, US Ambassador to the Sudan Timothy Carney, nowhere mentioned in the article, which notes merely that “Richardson and a State Department team were flying to Gogual”, the site of the meeting.

[775] . Note Chandler, A History, third edition, p. 240, “Much of the [UNTAC] money had gone into inflated salaries”.

[776] . These are the chapters by Heder, Ledgerwood, Ashley and Marston. Jordens shows a quite different slant, as will be discussed here, while Frieson and Edwards, although evincing the same mind set, focus on ancillary issues. Edwards’ chapter 2, “Imaging the Other in Cambodian Nationalist Discourse” is a confusing jumble of, I suppose, post-modern trendiness concerning a legitimate subject, ethnic prejudices in Cambodia. Besides some dubious assertions, it is marred by vulgarity of expression – ”strut his stuff” (p. 50), “propaganda spewed” (51), “flip side” (54, 68), “let rip with accusations” (57), and contrary to what the author hoped, supports accusations of partisanship within UNTAC 12.

[777] . See footnote 661 above and Heder, “Paranoia, genocide and the history books”, PPP 4/22, 3-16 Nov, 1995, p. 16, “the signing of political and military alliances between FUNCINPEC and the Cambodian People’s Party in late 1991”.

[778] . On Heder’s shiftiness see Ben Kiernan, “Implication and Accountability”, Bangkok Post, Sunday, January 31, 1999, Guest Column/Cambodia.

[779] . See Ledgerwood, p. 117. This is also clear in the chapters by Jordens and Ashley. 

[780] . “Patterns of CPP Political Repression and Violence During the UNTAC Period”, quotations pp. 116, 120-121, 126.

[781] . Heder-Ledgerwood, pp. 77, 114, 127, footnote 22, p. 133.

[782] . Heder-Ledgerwood, p. 115.

[783] . See Kiernan’s solid research on this point in Ben Kiernan, “Introduction”, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, pp. 9-32, note 42, p. 29.

[784] . Heder-Ledgerwood , page 172.

[785] . Marston in Heder-Ledgerwood, p. 220. Marston, however, did not mention Thun Bun Ly or his murder. Thun Bun Ly’s newspaper was identified as Oudomkati khmer in PPP 5/11, 31 May-13 June 1996, p. 5.

[786] . Al Santoli emerged as a commentator on Cambodia with an article in The New Republic in May 1983, which started with a description of an attack from the PRK side on the Khmer Rouge base of Phnom Chhat, which Santoli refused to acknowledge as a Khmer Rouge base, treating is as an ordinary refugee camp. He then charged the PRK with instituting starvation, “farming was severely restricted” during the first year of the Vietnamese occupation, “which created a famine”, and he repeated the CIA propaganda figure of 700,000 dead of starvation during that first year, asserting moreover that “Hanoi’s ruthless imperial drive killed as many Cambodians in one year as died in the five years” of Pol Pot. Then, still after 1979, “the Buddhist religion...is suppressed [and] temples are used for political indoctrination meetings”, and the country was flooded with Vietnamese settlers. See Al Santoli, “The New Indochina War”, The New Republic, 30 May 1983, pp. 19-23. On these CIA figures, which Santoli sourced to Stephen Morris, see Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea: CIA to the Rescue”, BCAS. For the other derogatory material about the PRK Santoli relied on Elizabeth Becker’s 1983 Washington Post articles which I have discussed above, pp. 189, ff.. Later on, Al Santoli was an assistant to Dana Rohrabacher in his campaign to undermine SOC Cambodia in favor of the anti-Vietnamese racist Sam Rainsy. Julio Jeldres was an immigrant from Allende’s Chile (see note 711 above) to Australia in the early 1970s, who managed to get into Sihanouk’s entourage, and became an English-language propagandist against Sihanouk’s enemies, which then included the PRK/SOC, and in particular their supporters among western academics. After the Paris Agreement was signed Jeldres received $A20,000 Australian financing, arranged by Gareth Evans, to set up a “Khmer Institute for Democracy”, which was “the brainchild of Cambodian exiles in California”, and which continued the same propaganda functions (Leo Dobbs, “Former Royal Aide Opens Think Tank”, PPP, 1/10, 20 November-3 December, 1992, p. 2, ‘former’ referring to the fact that Jeldres had announced his resignation from Sihanouk’s service; to which he later returned, becoming Sihanouk’s official biographer). Not long before the election in May 1993 William Shawcross made a documentary film in Cambodia, including a scene of students in Jeldres’ Institute discussing politics in Khmer, with Jeldres presiding with a benign smile on his face. What the students were saying was strongly sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge, lost of course on Shawcross (whether Jeldres understands Khmer is not known to me, but he must certainly have had some idea of what went on in his classes). In November 1993 Jeldres’ Khmer Institute for Democracy sponsored a conference of representatives from Khmer NGOs to discuss the Khmer Rouge and immigration. There were demands to limit the entrance of foreigners [read ‘Vietnamese’] to Cambodia, and the head of the Khmer Students and Intellectuals Association said the government and the Khmer Rouge should negotiate (Mang Channo, “NGOs urge action on foreign workers”, PPP, 2/23, 5-18 November 1993, p. 19). The following year Jeldres tried to organize another conference against the proposed law to outlaw the Khmer Rouge, and, apparently for this, he was eased out of the Institute.  He had tried to organize a non-government forum in his Khmer Institute for Democracy to discuss the draft law outlawing the Khmer Rouge, the purpose of course being to drum up opposition. Ranariddh forbade Sam Rainsy and Norodom Sirivudh, the government members most vocally opposed to the law, to attend, and Chheang Vun, a CPP member of the assembly designated as new ambassador to Australia, accused Jeldres of interfering in internal affairs and threatened him with expulsion. This was quite piquant, for Jeldres is a naturalized Australian and his KID, the main NGO hothouse for Khmer Rouge propaganda in Phnom Penh, was financed by Australia, and was apparently a project in which Foreign Minister Gareth Evans had a direct interest. Because of the opposition of Sihanouk, who had faxed a message that he would refuse to sign, the assembly then had to vote a law authorizing Chea Sim, as acting chief of state, to sign the bill outlawing the Khmer Rouge (Bangkok Post, 5 July 1994, “Inside Indochina”, “Sihanouk balks at outlaw of KR”). This does not mean that Jeldres in a crypto-commie KR supporter. Everything he has written, as well as his associations, suggest that he is somewhere on the far right, and, like the Cambodian rightists whom he supports, believes that drawing the KR into the government can further the main right-wing goal – get rid of Hun Sen. PPP, 3/17, 26 August-8 September, 1994, with its record of sympathy for those trying to undermine the government, slanted a report against Chheang Vun (“Controversial Vun set for Canberra posting”), without clearly informing their readers what had been at issue, and at the time the incident occurred did not report it at all. In December 1994, PPP publisher Michael Hayes acknowledged to me that the headline about Chheang Vun had been bad, but excused himself on grounds of fatigue. In September 2007 Jeldres signed a book review as “Research Fellow at Monash University’s Asia Institute in Melbourne, Australia” (review of a Czech publication on King Sihamoni, PPP 16/17, 24 August-6 September, 2007, p. 6).

[787] . The Al Santoli article was possibly “A Strategy to Defeat the Khmer Rouge and Prevent Another War in Cambodia”, in Khmer Conscience, Vol 6, No 4, November-December 1992, which was a repeat of the main Khmer Rouge arguments, that the Vietnamese must leave Cambodia and UNTAC should  take over the government. He wrote, “Although Hanoi claims to have withdrawn its forces, UNTAC has failed to deter countless thousands of Vietnamese civilians who continue to pour into Cambodia”; “Policy makers must deal realistically, in Cambodian cultural terms [that is, hatred of Vietnamese],  with the reasons why the Khmer Rouge are growing stronger...”; Le Duc Anh is the new President of Viet Nam, but “If Hanoi had truly given up its Cambodia objective [that is, to conquer Cambodia], General Anh would have lost face politically and would have been demoted in the Party”; and, as a true VWR (Vietnam warmonger retread), Santoli said, “American leadership is needed to guide ill-prepared UNTAC authorities to formulate political action...”. The ‘Khmer Ideal’/Oudomkati khmer issue in question was 15 May 1993.  Another hotbed of anti-Vietnamese hysteria was the ‘Preah Sihanouk Raj Center for the Study of Khmer International Studies’, now renamed ‘Center for Advanced Studies’, set up with foreign financing under another returned exile, Thach Bunroeun. Soon after the election its Assistant Coordinator Kao Kim Hourn, was propagating to the international community the old lies that “in thirteen years of its occupation, Vietnam had successfully kept Khmer children and young adults ignorant of their history, to say nothing of Vietnamese language, philosophy and ideas which were imposed on the Khmer people...what the Vietnamese did to Cambodia in 13 years was the equivalent of a ‘brain drain’, a total loss to Cambodia’s mental resources which it [sic !] cannot be easily replaced”. Furthermore, he said, quoting his chief, Vietnamese “immigrants also took over Khmer labor and Khmer markets...brought in Vietnamese prostitutes to destroy Khmer Buddhist culture”, and “Vietnam also reinforced the already weakening of Cambodia when it invaded and occupied the Khmer nation for 13 years” (Kao Kim Hourn, “Beware the Soft Imperialists”, PPP, 2/19, 10-23 September 1993, p. 6.).

[788] . Edwards, in Heder-Ledgerwood, p. 51.

[789] . John Marston, “Post-Pol Pot Cambodia”, Review Essay, Critical Asian Studies 37/3 (September 2005), pp. 501-516. See pp. 503, 506; Gottesman, p. 112.

[790]. Kampuchea Pen Sovann, pp. 203, 191, 208, 216-217.

[791] . Quotations respectively from pp. 135, 146, 147.

[792] . Jordens, page 148.

[793] . Neither, apparently had Marston heard of it. At least in an e-mail exchange, in which I had alleged a cover-up by UNTAC, he refused to answer when I asked point-blank if Heder’s conclusions, now published in his and Ledgerwood’s book, were disseminated. Heder finally provided the following curious explanation. Acknowledging that the UNTAC 12 Analysis/Assessment reports on PDK/KR policy toward Vietnamese were circulated to top UNTAC staff, not to the general public, Heder added, “As for John Marston, he may have been unaware of the contents of these memos because by the time they were written, he was working for the Control Unit of the Information/Education Division, which was responsible for promoting freedom of the press in Cambodia and preventing abuse of this freedom by Cambodian news media. All Analysis/Assessment memos, etc, were copied to the head of this unit, the former chargé d’affaires of the Soviet Embassy in Phnom Penh, Valentin Sviridov.  It was up to him to decide about their further distribution.  He may have decided not to pass them on to his subordinates”.

[794] . Jordens, page 139.

[795] . “Kambodja en rättvis betraktelse”, Kommentar (Stockholm) Nr 2/96 (1996), pp. 15-24. Some post-1996 comment has been added here.

[796] . See above, pp. 418, ff. and Michael Vickery, “Överlever Kambodja ‘freden’“, Kommentar, Nr 1-2/1992, p. 3.

[797] .The Nation (Bangkok), 3 June 1996 Opinion, p. A5, “Politics left off the aid donors’ agenda”.

[798] . Even relatively low level foreign employees hired locally by an UNTAC component could earn over US$7,000 per month, in salary plus per diem, tax-free.

[799] . The US mission in Phnom Penh had “released to the diplomatic corps what is called in official jargon a ‘non paper’. The conclusion of this document was: “We are opposed to the establishment of any interim government” (The Nation, Bangkok 10 June 1993, “Let the Khmers decide on democracy”, a comment by Raoul Jennar).

[800] . Raoul Jennar, “Cambodian Chronicles (X)”, 29 June 1993. Jennar told me this earlier in a personal conversation, then he stated it publicly in a large NGO meeting, before publishing it in his “Chronicles”. Even if, for lack of witnesses or other proof, Jennar can never reveal who the official was, I consider Jennar’s report credible, and the identity of the American transparent.

[801] . See above, Kremlinology and Cambodia, pp. 270, ff; “Chea Sim: the hardline leader”, pp. 396, ff.; below, p. 520.

[802] . This was permitted by the UNTAC rules under which voting was for parties and parties had control over the choice of winning candidates. I have discussed these events in “Cambodia: a Political Survey”, Discussion Paper No. 14, The Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian  National University, 1994; and in Cambodia: A Political Survey, Phnom Penh 2007, p. 92-98.

[803] . See Steve Heder, “Cambodia, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union: Intentionality, Totalitarianism, Functionalism and the Politics of Accountability” (Draft for Presentation at the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 29 March 2003), 64 pp; above, pp. 294, 301;Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, pp. 199-200, and above on Heder-Ledgerwood. Sar Kheng’s trip was reported in PPP, vol. 2. no. 24, 19 November-2 December 1993, Nate Thayer, “New govt: who’s really in control”; and Sin Song’s invitation was reported in PPP vol. 3, no. 3, 11-24 February 1994, Nate Thayer, “Fury over Sin Song’s trip to US”. Information on Sin Song’s patron is from Indochina Interchange, Vol. 4 no 1, March 1994.

[804] . See above p. 369.

[805] . This appeared in The Nation (Bangkok), 24 June 1994, “Sihanouk and Hun Sen at opposite ends”, text of Hun Sen’s letter to Sihanouk concerning Sihanouk’s desire to assume power.

[806] . See PPP 3/14, 15-28 July 1994, much of it sympathetic treatment of Chakrapong and Sin Song and otherwise tendentious reporting by Nate Thayer, on which see letter by Michael Vickery, PPP 1/19, 23Sept-6 Oct 1994, p. 9.

[807]. AI Index: ASA 23/11/95, 22 June 1995, “Kingdom of Cambodia Concern for the safety of elected representatives”.

[808]. Gretchen Peters, “Kirby, Krishnadasan Back Rainsy’s Fight”, The Cambodia Daily, 2 June 1995.

[809]. Letter from Amnesty International, Ref: C-GCF, dated 4 October 1995, signed by Kelly Dowling, Southeast Asia Team.

[810]. PPP, 4/19, 22 September-5 October 1995.

[811]. Ranariddh, “Vital Issues”, dated 3 August 1995, published in PPP 4/17, 25 August-7 September, pp. 8-9.

[812]. “Human rights Questions: Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights”, A/50, September 1995, p. 19.

[813] . The expression “Phnom Penh Spring” was used by Michael Hayes, “The politics of fear: what’s next?”, PPP, Vol. 4, No. 24, 1-14 December 1995, p. 1.

[814] . The exchange of letters concerning Sirivudh was published in PPP, Vol. 4, No. 25, 15-28 December, 1995, p. 12.

[815] . See Jason Barber and Ker Munthit, “Former Minister [Kong Korm] jumps over to new Rainsy party”, PPP, Vol. 4, No. 23, 17-30 November 1995, p. 3. Khmer Nation Party launched 9 November 1995.

[816] . PPP, Vol. 4, No. 17, 25 August- 7 September, 1995,  p. 4, Ker Munthit, “...while another political faction rises”.

[817] . Sara Colm, “Factions, UNTAC Debate Electoral Law”, PPP, 1/1, 10 July 1992.

[818] . PPP, Vol. 2 No. 9, 23 April-6 May 1993, p. 4; Kevin Barrington, “Rainsy Bemoans Censorship, UN Cites Racism”. The prominent FUNCINPEC member, Mr. Sam Rainsy was refused permission to broadcast one of his election speeches because it was considered too racist in his attacks on Vietnamese. UN officials said “the text did not take into account the responsibilities involved in the freedom of expression”....”The freedom of expression also has responsibilities”. “It was racist in the extreme”; “He used it [the word ‘Yuon’] repeatedly, insistently, emphatically, and with some degree of venom”. The four points Rainsy raised in his script were also the straight Khmer Rouge line. (1) the present regime was installed by the Yuon, (2) the regime was therefore indebted to the Yuon, (3) they must give compensation to the Yuon, and (4) the regime leaders will use the sweat blood, wealth and territory of Cambodia to pay, in order to stay in power and keep the support of the Yuon. Already in 1993 Rainsy showed his true colors. Interestingly, the PPP article said that “some members of the UN Information and Education sympathize with” Rainsy’s complaint that he was being treated unfairly. This is not surprising given the political tendencies of UNTAC 12, discussed above.

[819] . This was a surprise, and disappointment, to some of the ‘Human Rights activists’ in UNTAC and the post-UNTAC United Nations Center for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, who were always hoping for stories of police brutality and torture. They wanted cases which could be immediately and directly used against the government, not cases which were the objective effects of the changes forced on Cambodia by international pressure. See Hanne Sophie Greve (see above, p. 431, note 654 , “Land Tenure and Property Rights in Cambodia”, unpublished report, Phnom Penh, 1993, quoted in Jan Ovesen, Ing-Britt Trankell, and Joakim Öjendal, When Every Household is an Island, Uppsala Research Reports in Cultural Anthropology, No. 15, 1996, p. 20.

[820] . I became involved in investigation in this area because, together with a colleague from the Peace and Conflict Resolution Department of Uppsala University, Dr. Ramses Amer, I was engaged by SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency) to prepare a report on “Democracy and Human Rights in Cambodia”. Our research in Cambodia was in December 1995, and we finished writing the report early in 1996. Some of the findings are included here.

[821] . Royal Government of Cambodia, Ministry of Planning, National Institute of Statistics, “Report on the Socio-Economic Survey of Cambodia 1993/94”, Phnom Penh, 1995.

[822] . Edward B. Fiske, Using Both Hands, Women and Education in Cambodia, Manila, Asian Development Bank, 1995, p. 32.

[823] . Mu Sochua spent the Democratic Kampuchea period in the United States, then worked in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border from the early 1980s, and returned to Cambodia at the time of the Paris Agreement. She associated with FUNCINPEC, and at the time she was nominated by that party to be Minister she was an adviser to Prince Ranariddh. In the 1998 election she was elected as a FUNCINPEC deputy from Battambang; but after the 2003 election she defected to the Sam Rainsy party.

[824] . “u Sochua: the long fight for women’s rights”, PPP, 22 March-4 April 1996, p. 7; Pang Yin Fong, “Mu’s vision for a new Cambodia”, New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), Life and Times, p. 1, 30 May 1996.

[825] . Published in PPP, 15-30 May 1997, and in an abbreviated version in The Nation (Bangkok), 16 May 1997.

[826] . Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, US-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, South End Press 1984.

[827] . Heder, PPP 4/4, 24 Feb-9 March 1995, p. 19); and Ashley, (PPP (4/11, 2-15 June 1995, p. 6.

[828] . Yoshihara Kunio, The Rise of Ersatz Capitalism in South-East Asia. Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1988.