Cambodian genocide denial
Cambodian genocide denial was the belief expressed by many Western academics that claims of atrocities by the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia were much exaggerated. Many scholars of Cambodia and intellectuals, opposed to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War denied or minimized the human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary reports as "tales told by refugees" and U.S. propaganda. They viewed the assumption of power by the communist Khmer Rouge as a positive development for the people of Cambodia who had been severely impacted by the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War.
On the other side of the argument, anti-Communists in the United States and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their belief that the victory of communist governments in Southeast Asia would lead to a "bloodbath".
Scholar Donald W. Beachler, writing of the controversy about the range and extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities, concluded that "much of the posturing by academics, publicists, and politicians seems to have been motivated largely by political purposes" rather than concern for the Cambodian people.
With conclusive evidence of a large number of deaths—estimated at between one and three million—of Cambodians caused by the Khmer Rouge, denials, deniers, and apologists largely disappeared, although disagreements concerning the actual number of Khmer Rouge victims have continued.
Against the background of the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia, the United States practiced what the Washington Post called "hold-your-nose diplomacy", recognizing the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia while abhoring the "record of genocide" of the Khmer Rouge. The U.S. policy was in solidarity with China, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries who opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
Background
The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 17, 1975 and immediately ordered all the residents to evacuate the city. "Between two and three million residents of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other big towns were forced by the communists to walk into the countryside ... without organized provision for food, water, shelter, physical security or medical care." The evacuation probably resulted in at least 100,000 deaths. The dispossessed urban dwellers were assigned to re-education camps or "New Settlements." Former government employees and soldiers were executed. Soon, according to journalists, Cambodia resembled "a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor."The Khmer Rouge guarded the border with Thailand and only a few thousand refugees were able to make their way to Thailand and safety. As virtually no Westerners were allowed to visit Cambodia, those refugees plus the official news outlets of the Khmer Rouge were the principal sources of information about conditions in Cambodia for the next four years.
The "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV)
Beachler has described the late 1970s debate about the character of the Khmer Rouge. "Many of those who had been opponents of U.S. military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia feared that the tales of murder and deprivation under the Khmer Rouge regime would validate the claims of those who had supported U.S. government actions aimed at halting the spread of communism. Conservatives pointed to the actions of the Khmer Rouge as proof of the inherent evils of communism and evidence that the U.S. had been right to fight its long war against communists in Southeast Asia".Despite the eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion during the first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of refugees; many academics in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia and other countries portrayed the Khmer Rouge favorably or at least were skeptical about the stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities. None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia until the final few days of Khmer Rouge rule and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.
Some Western scholars believed that the Khmer Rouge would free Cambodia from colonialism, capitalism, and the ravages of American bombing and invasion during the Vietnam War. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-Khmer Rouge academics as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia". The STAV, which he said included among its adherents almost all Cambodian scholars in the Western world, "hoped for, more than anything, a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants, fighting imperialism, and revolution." Author William Shawcross was another critic of the STAV academics. Shawcross's views were endorsed and summarized by human rights activist David Hawk: the West was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia due to "the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories."
The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge intensified in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul in Reader's Digest magazine. Based on extensive interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand, Barron and Paul estimated that, out of a total population of about 7 million people, 1.2 million Cambodians had died of starvation, over-work, or execution during less than two years of Khmer Rouge rule. Published about the same time was François Ponchaud's book, Cambodia: Year Zero. Ponchaud, a French priest, had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer. He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge. French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in The New York Review of Books on March 31, 1977.
Porter was the most outspoken of the academics. He co-authored Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, in which Porter characterized the accounts of a million or more dead Cambodians as wildly exaggerated. In a review for The New York Review of Books, Shawcross wrote that that the authors' "use of evidence can be seriously questioned". He wrote that "their apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing the lies that governments tell".
Solarz hearing
On May 3, 1977, Congressman Stephen Solarz led a hearing on Cambodia in the United States House of Representatives. The witnesses were Barron and three academics who specialized in Cambodia: David P. Chandler, who would become perhaps the most prominent American scholar of Cambodia, Peter Poole, and Gareth Porter. Chandler believed that "bloodbath" was an accurate description of the situation and by no means an exaggeration. Porter again stated that the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities were much exaggerated. He said, "I cannot accept the premise ... that 1 million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people". Porter described the stories by refugees of Khmer Rouge atrocities collected by Barron and others as second-hand and hearsay. Asked for his sources, Porter cited the works of another adherent of the STAV, Ben Kiernan, who as a student was an editor for a pro-Khmer Rouge publication in Australia. Porter never mentioned having spoken to any Cambodian refugees to evaluate their stories personally.Solarz, who had visited Cambodian refugee camps and listened to refugees' stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, characterized justifications and explanations during the hearing about the Khmer Rouge as "cowardly and contemptible" and compared them to the justifications of the murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler during World War II.
Chomsky and Herman
On June 6, 1977, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman published an article in The Nation which contrasted the views expressed in books by Barron and Paul, Ponchaud, and Porter and Hildebrand, and in articles and accounts by Butterfield, Bragg, Kahin, Cazaux, Shanberg, Tolgraven and others. Their conclusion was: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered."Chomsky and Herman noted the conflicting information in the various accounts, and suggested that after the "failure of the American effort to subdue South Vietnam and to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina" there was now "a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of the United States in a more favorable light". This rewriting of history by the establishment press was served well by "tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom." They wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" because "refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear."
In support of their assertion, Chomsky and Herman criticized Barron and Paul's book Murder of a Gentle Land for ignoring the U.S. government's role in creating the situation, saying, "When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the American attack". They give several examples to show that Barron and Paul's "scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny," and they conclude that, "It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience."
Chomsky and Herman had both praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Year Zero, writing on the one hand that it was "serious and worth reading" and on the other that "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary." In the introduction to the American edition of his book, Ponchaud responded to a personal letter from Chomsky, saying, "He wrote me a letter on October 19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way it was being misused by anti-revolutionary propagandists. He has made it my duty to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly, according to him, those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle Land."
A different response appeared in the British introduction to Ponchaud's book.
"Even before this book was translated it was sharply criticized by Mr Noam Chomsky and Mr Gareth Porter . These two 'experts' on Asia claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. They say there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. They accuse me of being insufficiently critical in my approach to the refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a valid source ... "After an investigation of this kind, it is surprising to see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees should reject their very significant place in any study of modern Cambodia. These experts would rather base their arguments on reasoning: if something seems impossible to their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach which they accuse others of not having?"
Cambodia scholar Bruce Sharp criticized Chomsky and Herman's Nation article, as well as their subsequent work After the Cataclysm , saying that while Chomsky and Herman added disclaimers about knowing the truth of the matter, and about the nature of the regimes in Indochina, they nevertheless expressed a set of views by their comments and their use of various sources. For instance, Chomsky portrayed Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Sharp, however, found that 33 out of 50 citations in one chapter of Porter and Hildebrand's book derived from the Khmer Rouge government and six from China, the Khmer Rouge's principal supporter.
Cambodia correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation article that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll." Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee testimony" believing that "their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer Rouge government, 'including systematic distortion of the truth.'"
Beachler cited reports that Chomsky's attempts to counter charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted of writing letters to editors and publications. He said: "Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver of The New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words." Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to The New York Review of Books. Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of what he said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda."
Journalist Christopher Hitchens defended Chomsky and Herman in 1985. They "were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretations". Chomsky and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the situation in Cambodia was reasonable, based on the information available to them at the time, and a legitimate critique of the disparities in reporting atrocities committed by communist regimes relative to the atrocities committed by the U.S. and its allies.
Murder of Malcolm Caldwell
was a British academic who wrote extensively about Cambodia, including, a few months before his death, an article in The Guardian denying reports of Khmer Rouge genocide. Caldwell was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers, two Americans, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, and Caldwell, to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978—nearly four years after the Khmer Rouge had taken power. The invitation was apparently an effort by Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, to improve the image of the Khmer Rouge in the West, now questioned by some of its former academic sympathizers. On December 22, Caldwell had a private meeting with Pol Pot and returned "euphoric" to the guest house in Phnom Penh where the three members of the delegation were staying. During the night Becker awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw a Cambodian man with a gun in the guest house outside her room. Later that night she and Dudman were allowed by guards to venture out of their rooms and they discovered Caldwell's body. He had been shot. The body of a Cambodian man was also in his room.The murder of Caldwell has never been fully explained. Four of the Cambodian guards were arrested and two "confessed" under torture. They said, "We were attacking to ruin the Khmer Rouge Party's policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world ... it would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in support of our Party ... Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it." Whatever the motive behind Caldwell's murder, it seems highly unlikely that it could have occurred in tightly-controlled Cambodia without the involvement of high-level Khmer Rouge officials.
The impact of Caldwell's visit to Cambodia and his murder was muted by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia three days later on December 25, 1978, which soon ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Support for the Khmer Rouge in the Western academic community of Cambodian scholars quietly faded away. Peter Rodman, an American foreign policy expert and public official, stated that "When Hanoi turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became respectable for many on the Left to 'discover' the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge — qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years."
Gunnar Bergström and the SKFA
In August 1978, the Swede Gunnar Bergström, who was then president of the SKFA as well as one of the Khmer Rouge's most ardent supporters, was the only Westerner allowed to visit Democratic Kampuchea together with three other Swedes. They also had dinner with Pol Pot.At that time, Gunnar Bergström was just 27 years old and he was an idealist and a leftist, believing that the reports about overwork, starvation and mass killings in Cambodia were just "Western propaganda". They saw "smiling peasants", a society on its way to become "an ideal society,...with no oppressors". When they came back to Sweden, they "undertook a speaking tour and wrote articles in support of the Democratic Kampuchea regime".
Evidence that emerged after the fall of the regime shocked Bergström, forcing him to change his views. He said that it was "like falling off the branch of the tree" and that he had to re-identify everything he had believed in. In later interviews, he acknowledged that he had been wrong, that it was a "propaganda tour" and that they were brought to see what they wanted them to see.
After then, Gunnar Bergström went back to Cambodia for a "big forgiveness tour". In a speech with high school students in Phnom Penh on 12 September 2016, he recommended that everybody should learn history and he stated that a peaceful communist revolution is not possible.
Recanting
With the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of incontestable evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, including mass graves, the "tales told by refugees", which had been doubted by many Western academics, proved to be entirely accurate. Some former enthusiasts for the Khmer Rouge recanted their previous views, others diverted their interest to other issues, and a few continued to defend the Khmer Rouge.In an exchange with William Shawcross in an issue of The New York Review of Books dated July 20, 1978, Gareth Porter wrote that, "It is true, as Shawcross notes from my May 1977 Congressional testimony, that I have changed my view on a number of aspects of the Cambodian situation. I have no interest in defending everything the Khmer government does, and I believe that the policy of self-reliance has been carried so far that it has imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia. Shawcross, however, clearly does have an interest in rejecting our conclusions. It is time, I suggest, for him to examine it carefully, because it does not make for intellectual honesty." Shawcross responded, "I was glad to acknowledge in my article that Mr. Porter had changed his views on the Khmer Rouge and it is a tribute to his own integrity that he now agrees that the Khmer Rouge have imposed 'unnecessary costs' on the Cambodian people. He should, however, be a little more careful before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of intellectual dishonesty."
In 2010, Porter said he had been waiting many years for someone to ask him about his earlier views of the Khmer Rouge. He described how the climate of distrust of the government generated during the Vietnam War carried over to Cambodia. "I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing . They were lying," he explained. "I've been well aware for many years that I was guilty of intellectual arrogance. I was right about the bloodbath in Vietnam, so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia."
Australian Ben Kiernan recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979. He admitted that he had been "late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in Cambodia ... and wrong about ... the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973".
In the opinion of Donald W. Beachler, the genocide deniers and doubters among academics may have been motivated more by politics than a search for the truth, but conservatives who "embraced the reports" of Khmer Rouge atrocities had no less "cynicism or naiveté" in later downplaying reports of atrocities by anti-communists in Central America. He noted that the supportive attitude towards the Khmer Rouge had also been expressed by the U.S. government and politicians for a dozen years after the regime was toppled in January 1979, as part of the denigration against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s. In fact, the U.S. was one of the countries that had voted for the retainment of the Democratic Kampuchea's seat at the United Nations until 1991. Bruce Sharp, who points out many errors of Chomsky's analysis, also says that "While Chomsky's comments on Cambodia are misleading and inaccurate, one important point must be borne in mind: The actions of the United States were largely responsible for the growth of the Khmer Rouge".
Certain authors have continued to downplay Khmer Rouge atrocities in recent years. Richard Dudman, who accompanied Caldwell to Cambodia, challenged the "conventional wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics who practiced deliberate genocide slaughtered more than one million Cambodians" in a 1990 New York Times editorial, arguing that "The evidence for these fixed beliefs consists mainly of poignant though statistically inconclusive anecdotes from accounts of mass executions in a few villages. It comes mostly from those with an interest in blackening the name of the Khmer Rouge: From Cambodian refugees, largely the middle- and upper-class victims of the Pol Pot revolution, and from the Vietnamese." In 2012, journalist Israel Shamir wrote an article titled "Pol Pot Revisited" for the American left-wing newsletter CounterPunch in which he argued:
"New Cambodia under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors. Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover, they said ... Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated 'by a factor of a thousand'... To me, this recalls other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin's Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor ... supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention."
In 2013, the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen passed legislation which makes illegal the denial of the Cambodian genocide and other war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. The legislation was passed after comments by a member of the opposition, Kem Sokha, who is the deputy president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party. Sokha had stated that exhibits at Tuol Sleng were fabricated and that the artifacts had been faked by the Vietnamese following their invasion in 1979. Sokha's party have claimed that the comments have been taken out of context.