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By Root 2674 0

into participants in an anti-American crusade,” as it “destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK [Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution,” a “class warfare between the ‘base people,’ who had been bombed, and the ‘new people’ who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States.” “French intransigence had turned nationalists into Communists,” Philip Windsor observes, while “American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics.”34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of “base people,” and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse. But that it was a factor can hardly be doubted.

Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during “the decade of the genocide” as being roughly in the same range.

Little is known about phase I of “the genocide.” There was little interest in ascertaining the facts, at the time or since. The Finnish Inquiry Commission Report devotes three cursory pages to the topic, because the information available is so meager. The second phase has been far more intensively studied, and by now substantial evidence is available about what took place. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan observe that as a result of the intense interest in phase II, “we know a great deal more about the texture of daily life in Democratic Kampuchea, supposedly a ‘hermit’ regime, than we do about the ostensibly open regimes of the Khmer Republic (1970–1975) or the Sihanouk era (1954–1970) which preceded it.”35 Despite this already large imbalance in knowledge, the Cambodia Documentation Center in New York City concentrates on phase II of the genocide. The dramatic difference in the information available for the two phases, and the focus of the ongoing research effort, are readily explicable in terms of a propaganda model.

Outside of marginal Maoist circles, there was virtually no doubt from early on that the Khmer Rouge regime under the emerging leader Pol Pot was responsible for gruesome atrocities. But there were differing assessments of the scale and character of these crimes.

State Department Cambodia specialists were skeptical of the allegations that had received wide publicity by 1977—rightly, so subsequent inquiry revealed. The Far Eastern Economic Review based its January 1979 conclusion that the population had actually risen during the Pol Pot period on CIA sources, and its very knowledgeable correspondent Nayan Chanda, discussing the background for the Vietnamese invasion, reported that “some observers are convinced that had the Cambodian regime got a year’s reprieve, its internal and international image would have been improved enough to make any Vietnamese drive difficult if not impossible.”36

Differing assessments persisted even after the abundant evidence provided by the flow of refugees to Thailand in 1979 and visits to Cambodia, which also provided the first significant information about the years 1977–78. At one extreme, Pol Pot continued to be described as having forged new patterns of genocide comparable to the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin. At the other extreme, we have the postwar evaluation by U.S. government specialist Douglas Pike, now head of the University of California Indochina Archives, the “independent-minded” scholar lauded by Freedom House and the exemplar of the new, nonideological scholarship much admired by the New York Times. Pike described Pol Pot in November 1979 as the “charismatic” leader of a “bloody but successful peasant revolution with a substantial residue of popular support,” under which “on a statistical basis, most of them [peasants] . . . did not experience much in the way of brutality.”37 The 1980 CIA demographic study assigns the Pol Pot–era