37/ Vickery vs. Morris, 1983
The Editor, New York Times, New York,
12 January 1983
Dear Sir,
The granting of space on a New York Times feature page (15 December
1982) to Stephen J. Morris (" Aiding Cambodia") is a
perfect illustration of a point made by Noam Chomsky and Edward
S. Herman in their Political Economy of Human Rights; the
mainstream media are open to any kind of propagandist who advances
the correct ideological line, while serious students, or people
with first-hand information may be forced to present their points
of view in obscure fringe publications.
Even given this situation, the choice of Morris as spokesman on
Cambodia is particularly surprising, for he is not at all a Cambodia,
or even Asian, scholar (his area is Russian studies), and to the
extent that he has ventured into the Cambodia field on earlier
occasions his output has been egregiously incompetent, even scurrilous
(see attached copy of his review of Chomsky and Herman in Harvard
International Review and my response to it). But the New York
Times has done worse, being, so far as I have noticed, the only
major news organ to publish a totally faked article on Cambodia
(Christopher Jones, " In the Land of the Khmer Rouge,"
20 December 1981), and the fraudulent nature of which was clear
to any Cambodia specialist with hardly more than a cursory reading.
Of course one must not be a snob, and even non-specialists sometimes
make valuable contributions (for example Chomsky and Herman on
Indochina), but in Morris' piece there is scarcely a statement
which would be accepted by scholars studying contemporary Cambodia.
Some of them have been soundly refuted by Joel Charny (NYT letters
21 December 1982), but others require further discussion.
If there was any "rape of Cambodia" at all, it was during
the US-sponsored war of 1970-75 and the ensuing Pol Pot period.
All such ravishing then ended, and Cambodia has progressed very
satisfactorily under its new Vietnam-supported government which
in no way resembles " colonialism", however defined.
The American "memory of Vietnam", resentment against
a country which defeated the U.S. onslaught, may indeed have played
a role since 1979, in hindering aid for the recovery of the Cambodian
people and encouraging collusion in the rehabilitation of the
Pol Pot forces.
However evil the Pol Pot regime, and whatever disagreement may
exist among students of the question, it is impossible to speak
of the extermination of two million-the evidence being the size
of the surviving population compared with the generally accepted
figure for the population in 1975. Any precise figure is probably
impossible to determine, but all such extreme estimates have been
pulled out of thin air for the purposes of partisan propaganda.
Another figure thrown out by Morris, 700,000 killed in 1979 by
Vietnamese-induced starvation, is even more certainly disinformation,
as Morris well knows. That estimate was cooked up by the CIA in
a disinformation tract which whitewashed Pol Pot's worst massacres
in order to make the new Heng Samrin government appear worse,
and which I have analyzed in a recently published article ("
Democratic Kampuchea : CIA to the Rescue", Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars 14,4 (1982) ). Moreover, it is now
apparent that there never was large-scale starvation in Cambodia
in 1979, nor any danger of it ; and to the extent localized hunger
appeared, the Vietnamese and other socialist countries , particularly
the USSR, were working to alleviate it well before certain western
governments decided that it could make a useful propaganda issue.
This is clear from abundant refugee testimony (which I gathered
on the spot in 1980). At least it was clear when it was possible
to speak directly to refugees and with sufficient time to examine
and compare stories and return for further questioning. A different
type of 'refugee stories' which pushed an anti-Vietnamese line
were manufactured in the Khmer Serei border camps (now the bases
of the Son Sann and Sihanouk groups), and transmitted by people
like François Ponchaud to gullible journalists such as
William Shawcross ("The End of Cambodia ?", New York
Review of Books, 24 January 1980 [see below]), from whose
work they have been snatched up eagerly by those suffering from
"the memory of Vietnam".
The alleged "puppet regime" of Cambodia is led by men
who began fighting for Cambodian independence from France at a
time when Pol Pot was still a schoolboy and when Sihanouk was
showing a preference for French political tutelage over Cambodian
nationalism (see my "Looking Back at Cambodia", in Ben
Kiernan and Chantou Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea,
1942 - 1981). They fought again against Lon Nol and his American
backers, but in the end were finessed out of leadership positions,
and most of their comrades murdered, as a result of the anti-Vietnamese
chauvinism which was responsible for the worst massacres in Democratic
Kampuchea and which closet Pol Pot Potists like Morris seek to
revive.
The opposition which Morris wishes to support not only, as Charny
pointed out, suffers from a near total lack of grassroots support,
and would not now exist without the indecent scramble of the United
States, China and Thailand to rehabilitate Pol Pot after 1979,
but no amount of military and economic aid to Son Sann and Sihanouk,
as their men in the field admit (I visited their camps in 1980,
81, 82 ), can strengthen them sufficiently to oppose the PRK and
Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. They do not try to hide the circumstance
that they want such aid for interfactional rivalry, and that only
international pressure would be able to push the Vietnamese out
of Cambodia by force. What the Son Sann and Sihanouk groups want
is an international, preferably U.S.-led, intervention to drive
the Vietnamese out, overthrow the PRK, and put them back in the
saddle in Phnom Penh.
On one final point I must both take issue with Morris and insist
that Charny is overly optimistic. This is the value of the Sihanouk-Son
Sann forces, "representing non-totalitarian, nationalist
values" (Morris), the "last Cambodian leaders with a
shred of credibility" (Charny). I have treated the nature
of Sihanoukism in my "Looking Back at Cambodia", Lon
Nol and Pol Pot are known to all, and I would say that the least
totalitarian regime which Cambodia has had since 1970, perhaps
earlier, is the present PRK government in Phnom Penh, which cannot
be faulted on nationalism, even if they are closely allied with
Vietnam. Why are American, Chinese, and Thai "puppets"
more nationalistic ?
As for credibility, the reasons why Sihanouk's overthrow in 1970
was welcomed by all who are now active in Pol Pot's, Heng Samrin's,
and Son Sann's forces are still operative, and were epitomized
in November 1982 when the courtiers who run his operation in Bangkok,
in a caper like the scandals which rocked Cambodia in the 1960s,
attempted to sell forest rights within Cambodia to a private Thai
firm--a move which finally had to be denounced both by Sihanouk
and the Thai authorities. Even Sihanouk himself no longer has
the old charisma. Half the present Cambodian population is too
young to have a clear memory of him as their leader; and when
he visited the largest Cambodian refugee center in Thailand last
July 7 I was able to observe that it required several hours of
exhortation by camp authorities to get out a respectable crowd
to greet him.
Son Sann's officials in the field quite openly despise the Sihanoukists,
but the KPNLF, although including many honorable and professionally
competent figures, is itself ridden with factional strife and
its more corrupt elements seem to have too powerful backing to
be removed with impunity (see Far Eastern Economic Review,
5 November 1982, p. 13)
Thus if support for the least totalitarian, constructively nationalist,
credible, and humane regime is the issue, we should take Morris'
first option and recognize "the Vietnamese puppet regime"
(the only modern Cambodian government, including Sihanouk's, which
has not tried to massacre its political opponents). For once,
however, Morris is correct. Such a step would indeed be a blow
to an entire linked pattern of American diplomacy ; and that demands
consideration of the reasons why the chosen American goals in
so many parts of the world require support for the worst available
factions of local leaders.
END
(The article of the New York Times to which this letter
answers has not been found.)