The Destruction of Neutrality – Cambodia in The Killing Fields

Reel Whirled Peas



For me, the most troubling thing about studying contemporary issues, through film or other media, is that it reminds me of the bottomless capacity of human beings to inflict pain and death on others. What occurs in the hearts of men who remorselessly kill children and the defenseless? And, how can there be so many likeminded people bent on the destruction of millions of others?

Those questions arose again as I watched The Killing Fields, Roland Jaffe’s film adaptation of the true story of a 1970s American news reporter and his Cambodian partner. The movie is full of moral conflicts and outrages, of the indelicate balancing of suffering and ideology, and of the destruction of neutrality, both political and moral. There was plenty of blame to go around for the sequence of events that eventually led to the deaths of as much as 1/3 of the entire population.

Some of the blame must be directed at the U.S., for its “secret war” in Cambodia beginning in 1969.The action in the film begins in August 1973, when New York Times foreign correspondent Sydney Schanberg returning to Cambodia just after the U.S. Congress had determined that U.S. bombings in Cambodia were illegal and the military was directed to stop. By that time, it’s been estimated that the U.S. had dropped over 500,000 tons, or $7 billion worth of bombs on Cambodia since 1969.

Despite Cambodia’s official position of neutrality in the U.S. – Viet Nam War, Norodom Sihanouk, the erstwhile king and head of state, began allowing the Vietcong to use border villages and ports to hide from American and South Vietnamese ground troops, store ammunition, receive armament shipments from Russia and China, and plan guerilla attacks. Gen. Creighton Abrams, the senior officer in charge of American troops in Viet Nam, sought and received approval from President Nixon to begin the secret bombings directed at Viet Cong in March 1969. The New York Times broke the story of the secret bombings two months later. Soon after, Sihanouk, while in France, was replaced by General Lon Nol following a vote in the general assembly. The U.S. supported the ascendancy of Lon Nol who supported the U.S. and was a strong anti-communist but a weak leader and strategist. His government was corrupt, and his support of U.S. intrusion into Cambodia made Lon Nol extremely unpopular. Once again, the U.S. government, with its almost fanatic anti-communism foreign policy, had supported a weak exploitative head of state.

The carpet bombings, as is often the case, resulted in killing innocents in addition to the intended targets. In The Banyan Tree: Untangling Cambodian History, Bruce Sharp describes a wedding processional that wandered into a B-52 target zone near the village of Saang. Hundreds were killed. And, just after Schanberg’s return a B-52 crew “mistakenly” dropped its entire ordinance on the village of Neak Luong, killing 137 and wounding 205. This occurred after the ban on bombing Cambodia was imposed by Congress. The exact number of civilian casualties is unknown, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Such occurrences, combined with Lon Nol’s unpopularity and the reemergence of Sihanouk as a supporter of the communists, led tens of thousands of Cambodians to support the Khmer Rouge, who overthrew Lon Nol and assumed the seat of government in 1975.

Some of the blame for the catastrophe in Cambodia has to be directed at the foreign press covering the events. In the film, Sydney Schanberg, safely back in the U.S., is asked in an interview whether the press had a role in the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge. The interview followed Schanberg’s acceptance of an award, maybe it was his Pulitzer, for his and Dith Pran’s reporting of events. I thought it was an interesting, and troubling question, and his response was unsatisfactory. He admits that the press underestimated the communists, but that the real culprit was the $7 billion in bombs that the U.S. dropped.

I believe the press was obligated to report the secret actions of the U.S. government and the corruption of the Lon Nol regime. But where does the press draw the line in deciding if disclosure may result in greater atrocities than the event they are reporting? In his review of Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes 1968-1972 Nathan Alexander observes that Abrams viewed the press as his main opponent. “His struggles will be less in securing hamlets, than conveying the significance of this to the American public”, he writes. The confrontation between Schanberg and the military attaché early in the film shows the mistrust each has for the other. According to Alexander, the military began feeling hamstrung by the media, electing not to undertake certain initiatives because the media will stir up the anti-war forces back home. This was true of our actions in Cambodia, where a lack of popular support here for Lon Nol and our military may have diminished our capacity to keep the Khmer Rouge from gaining control.

Is it reasonable to assume that they should have done a better job reporting on the actions of the Khmer Rouge? In the film, Pran, Sydney, the driver and two other journalists are rousted from their vehicle and might have been killed were it not for Pran’s intercessory skills. They saw the brutality of the communists first hand. In their rush to trumpet the sins, and there were many, of the U.S. and Lon Nol, they, in Schanberg’s words, underestimated the brutality of the Khmer Rouge.

War correspondents are a strange group. They make a living off the suffering of people ravaged by conflict. There is another scene that takes place just after Schanberg receives his award, when he runs into Al Rockoff, the news photographer that served in Cambodia with Schanberg. Rockoff rebukes Schanberg, saying that he abandoned Dith Pran because the he was more interested in the Pulitzer Prize. That may not have been the case, but many correspondents become inured to the suffering surrounding the story, and in Cambodia I think that was true. Schanberg certainly agonized about Pran’s fate, but we see no evidence that he was remorseful about the driver who had served him for at least 3 years. At the beginning of the film, Schanberg refers to Cambodia as a place that he came to love and to pity. I think the word “pity” sums up his feelings correctly.

And, finally, blame must be put on the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. By 1972, the Khmer Rouge had built an army nearly 50,000 strong, perhaps 20 times as large as they were in the late 1960s. Their leader, Pol Pot (a nom de guerre), followed an extreme version of Marxism that he learned as a student in Paris. For him, the revolution superceded everything, including, or rather especially, human life. The favorite saying of the Khmer Rouge was “To preserve you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss”.

Pol Pot envisioned a Kampuchea – he changed the name following their victory – that would be completely rural and self-sufficiently agrarian. As soon as they assumed power, the Angkar – the government organization of the Khmer Rouge- forced hundreds of thousands out of the cities. Sharp describes how hospitals were emptied, with many dying in the transition. Families were forced to flee with a moments notice. People were identified as either “old people”, those from the countryside loyal to the communists, or “new people”, those from the cities, particularly professors, doctors, and nearly anyone with education. The Angkar wanted to eliminate anyone with the intellectual capability to rebel.

Their methods of elimination were not quite as efficient as, say, the Hitler’s Nazis, but efficient enough to lead to between 2 and 3 million deaths from 1975-1979. Most of those deaths resulted from systematic starvation, but hundreds of thousands of victims were shot, bludgeoned, burned, suffocated, impaled or disemboweled. The movie accurately depicts accounts I found in other sources. There was great brutality and cruelty in their destruction. Children as young as 12 or so, young girls, teenage boys, and middle aged men all partake in the killing in the film. Eventually, Pol Pot, like Stalin 40 years before, realized the only remaining threat were those he had trusted most, and, again like Stalin, he set about to purge the ranks of the Angkar. Despite being deposed by the Vietnamese in 1979, Pol Pot, despite leading one of the most ruthless regimes in the 20th century, still maintained a role in Cambodian politics until just before his death in 1998.

As for blame, I watched Sam Waterston as Schanberg deliver Sydney’s award acceptance speech several times. It was an indictment on the U.S. Government’s unholy bombing and invasion of Cambodia, but the substance of his ridicule could apply to all those involved in the Cambodian catastrophe: “…when decisions…were made…after they considered their options…and they concerned themselves with many things…great power conflicts, and collapsing dominoes…looking tough and dangerous. They had domestic concerns as well…. keeping secrets…and not ignoring self-interests in their own careers. The only thing they were not concerned with were the Cambodians themselves, not the society, and not the country, except in the abstract as instruments.”

So I return to the question of how such atrocities are perpetrated by so many. A reviewer of the film says we cannot “…dismiss The Killing Fields as more mysterious Asians mistreating each other, and Westerners, for their own inscrutable reasons. We must face their actions as the natural consequences of modern war and fanatical ideology…” (my emphasis) www.cambodian.com/dithpran/film.htm. Having experienced neither, I am still not sure how one gives up his humanity.
Background Sources:

Alexander, Nathan, review of Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes 1968-1972
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article4430.html

Canby, Vincent Screen: Tale of Death and Life of a Cambodian http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=&title2=KILLING%20FIELDS%2C%20THE%20%28MOVIE%29&reviewer=Vincent%20Canby&v_id=27323&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes

Ebert, Roger Film Review The Killing Fields http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19840101/REVIEWS/401010352/1023

Film Review The Killing Fields
http://www.cambodian.com/dithpran/film.htm

Internet Movie Database
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087553/

Sharp Bruce, The Banyan Tree: Untangling Cambodian History
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/banyan1.htm

Wikipedia Cambodia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia