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to attend to the actual text, which appeared in English a year later. See our PEHR, II.6, on the record of falsification based on this book, and on Ponchaud’s own remarkable record, further analyzed by Michael Vickery in his Cambodia: 1975–1982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984). CIA Research Paper, Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (Washington: CIA May 1980). For a critique of this study revealing extensive falsification conditioned by U.S. government priorities—specifically, suppression of the worst Pol Pot atrocities during the later period—see Michael Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea—CIA to the Rescue,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14.4 (1982), and his Cambodia. The latter is the major study of the Khmer Rouge period, by one of the few authentic Cambodia scholars, widely and favorably reviewed abroad by mainstream Indochina scholars and others but virtually ignored in the United States, as was the Finnish Inquiry Commission report. See Noam Chomsky, “Decade of Genocide in Review,” Inside Asia (London, February 1985, reprinted in James Peck, ed., The Chomsky Reader [New York: Pantheon, 1987]), on several serious studies of the period, including these.

23. Michael Vickery, “Ending Cambodia—Some Revisions,” submitted to the New York Review of Books in June 1981 but rejected. See his Cambodia for more extended discussion. Shawcross himself had had second thoughts by then (see “Kampuchea Revives on Food, Aid, and Capitalism,” The Bulletin [Australia], March 24, 1981). See his Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon Schuster, 1984), for a later version, now recast in ways to which we return.

24. Page 370, blaming Vietnamese deception for the account he had relayed in 1980.

25. Shawcross, The Nation, September 21, 1985; Ben Kiernan, letter to The Nation, October 3, 1985, unpublished. For evaluation of the international relief efforts, see Vickery, Cambodia; Kiljunen, Kampuchea; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U.S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984); Shawcross, Quality of Mercy.

26. François Ponchaud, on whom Shawcross relied, is a highly dubious source for reasons that have been extensively documented; see note 22. No one with a record of duplicity approaching his would ever be relied on for undocumented charges of any significance if the target were not an official enemy.

27. Shawcross, Quality of Mercy, pp. 49–50. He observes that “those years of warfare saw the destruction of Cambodian society and the rise of the Khmer Rouge from its ashes, in good part as a result of White House policies”; “with the forces of nationalism unleashed by the war at their command, the Khmer Rouge became an increasingly formidable army,” while in the “massive American bombing campaign” to which the Khmer Rouge were subjected through August 1973, “their casualities are thought to have been huge.” The phrase “their casualties” presumably refers to Khmer Rouge military forces; there is no mention of civilian casualties. On the limited scope of Shawcross’s “quality of mercy,” see “Phase III at home” (p. 269), below.

28. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 293.

29. AP, Boston Globe, September 24, 1978, citing the Report of the International Labor Organization in Geneva on over fifty million child laborers in the world, with Thailand singled out as one of the worst offenders, thanks to grinding poverty, an effective military government backed by the United States, lack of labor union power, and “wide-open free enterprise.” See PEHR, II.6, 359, for excerpts and other examples that have elicited even less interest, and PEHR, II, xv, on a World Bank description of the situation in Thailand. On the brutal treatment of many of the estimated 10.7 million child laborers in Thailand, see Human Rights in Thailand Report 9.1. (January–March 1985) (Coordinating Group for Religion in Society, Bangkok); Thai Development Newsletter 3.1 1985 (December 1986) (Bangkok). On the treatment of women in “the brothel of Asia,” with its estimated 500,000 prostitutes,