[D66] Imperialism and the Khmer Rouge trials

[Antid Oto]

Imperialism and the Khmer Rouge trials
17 December 2011

A historic whitewash lies at the heart of the trials of former leaders of the
Khmer Rouge regime currently underway in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.

Convened three decades after the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge reign of terror and mass
murder, the UN-orchestrated proceedings are designed to bury the underlying
responsibility for the Cambodian catastrophe—above all, that of United States
imperialism. Washington laid waste to Cambodia during the Vietnam War, in which
three million Vietnamese were killed.

Standing trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
(ECCC) are four Khmer Rouge leaders charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes
against humanity. In the absence of Pol Pot, the top Khmer Rouge leader who died
in 1998, the prosecution is intended to make them exclusively culpable for one
of the most chilling chapters of the twentieth century.

In the first phase of the trial, they are charged with the forced movement of
people from urban areas to the countryside during which an estimated one million
Cambodians were executed and a similar number died from starvation, disease and
overwork.

To this day, Pol Pot’s regime is routinely labelled by the mass media as
“communist.” There could be no more grotesque distortion. The Khmer Rouge was a
product of the suppression of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the late 1920s
and the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Pol Pot and his followers
emerged out of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, which pursued Stalinism’s
reactionary nationalist program of “socialism in one country.”

Faced with police repression under the post-colonial government of Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, the party leaders fled into the countryside in 1963, turned to
backward layers of the peasantry, and adopted a perspective of creating a
primitive peasant-based society in which money, culture and other facets of
urban life would be eliminated.

Such a movement could seize power in 1975 only as a result of the barbarism that
the US military unleashed on Cambodia’s people from the late 1960s as part of
the Vietnam War. Between 1969 and 1973, US forces dropped some 532,000 tons of
bombs on Cambodia—more than three times the tonnage dropped on Japan throughout
World War II.

Secretly launched by US President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser
Henry Kissinger without congressional approval, it was the most intensive
saturation bombing in world history. The death toll is estimated as high as 600,000.

In 1970, the White House and the CIA organised a coup that ousted Sihanouk, who
had sought to maintain neutrality and manoeuvre between Washington and Hanoi,
and installed a military dictatorship headed by General Lon Nol. A month later,
Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia by 20,000 US and Vietnamese troops.

Cambodian society disintegrated under the impact of the US bombing, compounded
by the brutal civil war waged by Lon Nol’s junta. Two million of the country’s
seven million people were rendered homeless, rice production plunged by more
than 80 percent, and economic life was shattered.

These were the conditions in which Pol Pot’s forces—less than 5,000 men in
1970—grew to an army of about 70,000. They captured Phnom Penh in April 1975
when Lon Nol’s US puppet regime finally disintegrated, just before the ultimate
defeat of the US-backed dictatorship in South Vietnam.

Faced with a country in ruins, and unwilling to feed the cities, the Khmer Rouge
ordered the evacuation of the entire urban population to undertake virtual slave
labour in the countryside. This profoundly anti-working class regime had more in
common with fascism than socialism.

As the “killing fields” terror unfolded, Washington shifted its support behind
the Khmer Rouge as a means of combating Vietnamese influence. Attacks on ethnic
Vietnamese in Cambodia triggered a Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, which
installed a breakaway Khmer Rouge faction commanded by Hun Sen, who remains the
prime minister of Cambodia.

In response, US President Jimmy Carter’s administration tacitly backed a massive
Chinese military assault on Vietnam and worked with China to supply Pol Pot’s
insurgents with arms. Washington regarded Pol Pot as a valuable Cold War ally
against Vietnam. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, later
admitted: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot... Pol Pot was an
abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”

Throughout the 1980s, the US, the European powers and China continued to
recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia. Until 1997,
successive United States governments blocked moves to place Pol Pot and his
colleagues on trial.

Washington’s preoccupation, shared by Beijing and Hun Sen, was that any trials
prevent an examination of their respective roles in the Cambodian tragedy. Years
of negotiations ensued before the ECCC was established in 2006, with strict
instructions to focus solely on the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

Those in the dock in Phnom Penh should include all those responsible for the
terrible events of the 1970s, including Kissinger, Carter and Brzezinski. Above
all, what happened to the people of Cambodia must stand as a warning of the
readiness of the major powers, cynically invoking the banners of freedom and
democracy, to subject millions of people to bloody wars and barbarism in the
pursuit of their strategic and commercial interests.

Today, amid the worsening global economic crisis and the aggressive drive by the
Obama administration to confront China and reassert hegemony over the
Asia-Pacific region, these dangers are greater than ever. In the early
twenty-first century, the historic war crimes perpetrated by the US in Vietnam
and Cambodia already have been replicated in the bombardment and devastation of
Iraqi society, the ongoing bloody occupation of Afghanistan, the extension of
that war into Pakistan and the military installation of a puppet regime in
oil-rich Libya.

As the criminal character of American foreign policy has become more blatant,
the middle-class ex-radicals who once protested against the Vietnam war and its
expansion into Cambodia have embraced the Obama administration and made their
peace with imperialism, backing the wars in Libya and Afghanistan and remaining
silent on the continuing US presence in Iraq. Noticeably, these layers have also
kept quiet about the travesty of the Khmer Rouge trials.

The indelible lesson of the Cambodian tragedy is the necessity for a united
struggle of the Indochinese, Asian and international working class, the only
force that can end war and capitalist exploitation. That requires the building
of sections of the world Trotskyist party, the International Committee of the
Fourth International, which alone seeks to expose and clarify the monumental
crimes of imperialism and Stalinism.

Mike Head

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/pers-d17.shtml