Ray Cavanaugh: Scholars failed to tell the truth about the genocidal Khmer Rouge

People who start their regime by vacating a capital city possibly have specific disturbing plans Fifty years ago in April the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated all residents including bedridden hospital patients of Phnom Penh Cambodia and all other sizable population centers Those who survived the evacuation were sent to do agrarian work at labor camps in rural areas This unique and alarming advancement elicited a very strange reaction though from relevant scholars in such countries as the United States the United Kingdom Australia France and Sweden which seemed to think the forcible relocation was a positive step forward In ensuing months emaciated Cambodian refugees began to surface at the demarcation with Thailand These refugees largely gave reports of forced labor starvation and appalling savagery And yet positive views of the Khmer Rouge remained prevalent among Western scholars who embracing revolution from thousands of miles away dismissed the myriad Cambodian refugee reports and pounced on anyone who wrote stories that corresponded with refugee accounts Cambodia also known in that period by the euphemistic name Democratic Kampuchea had basically ended all contact with the outside world But it might have been fruitful to visit the Thai side of the Cambodian boundary where thousands of emaciated and traumatized refugees had gathered This type of setting could have helped even the the bulk intransigent of scholars realize that reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities likely had validity Among those who took up the cause of minimizing Khmer Rouge misdeeds was Massachusetts Institute of Mechanism linguist and all-around guru Noam Chomsky who contended that reports of atrocity were part of a vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign perpetrated by Western media Though Chomsky was the the majority prominent Khmer Rouge apologist he was by no means the only major one Far from being the pursuit of a kooky fringe the defense of the Khmer Rouge came to represent a mainstream view among relevant scholars This viewpoint was so prevalent in the West that it was labeled the standard total academic view STAV on Cambodia by Sophal Ear a Cambodian refugee who became a political scientist in the U S and is now an associate professor in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University Several academics indeed treated Cambodia as a testing ground for their theories Ear disclosed He revealed they were also enamored with the concept of peasant revolutions and the Khmer Rouge policies of self-reliance which they viewed as an authentic anti-colonial stance Additionally it was feared that acknowledgment of Khmer Rouge atrocities would validate the U S military endeavors in Indochina which several people especially leading scholars had come to excoriate In their book Cambodia Starvation and Revolution co-authors George C Hildebrand and Gareth Porter stated Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as practicable But perhaps no one was drawn to Pol Pot as much as Scottish scholar Malcolm Caldwell Caldwell had written that the Khmer Rouge revolution opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries Caldwell received a rare invite to visit the utopia and even scored a private meeting with Pol Pot on Dec But hanging out with Brother Number One was unfailingly rather risky and later that night the visiting scholar was gunned down It is likely this episode would have received more interest from Western media but less than three days after Caldwell s murder Vietnam invaded Cambodia The Vietnamese were fed up by that point In addition to committing a genocide against Cambodians of Vietnamese ancestry the Khmer Rouge had launched repeated attacks on Vietnamese soil including the massacre of an entire village Vietnam s military was superior in size organization and morale Troops easily invaded Phnom Penh causing high-ranking Khmer Rouge to flee to western Cambodia s mountainous terrain along the Thai confines With Cambodia s door forcibly opened the ensuing revelations of killing fields and grisly interrogation centers was about as close as you can get to incontrovertible proof of widespread atrocity Among Western scholars chosen former supporters emerged to recant their previous statements Other supporters quietly withdrew from the now-obvious horror they had spent several years denying However particular scholars remained as unrepentant as the war criminals unmoved by any amount of ghastly hard evidence or at least not sufficiently moved to forsake the revolution Saying I m sorry I was wrong is just too much for particular people Ear mentioned They want to be correct in their minds constantly Even in after the consequences became grotesquely clear Egyptian-French scholar Samir Amin described the Khmer Rouge period as one of the major successes of the struggle for socialism in our era Not only did Amin express approval for what happened in Cambodia but he also recommended that African nations adopt the Khmer Rouge model As if Africa had not endured enough what it really needed according to Amin was its own Khmer Rouge Meanwhile the real Khmer Rouge was not dead yet Although forced out of Phnom Penh very rapidly the group still controlled much of Cambodia particularly in the geographically rugged western part of the country Along with holding important military guidance the Khmer Rouge enjoyed a degree of international legitimacy Into the early s the party of Pol Pot managed to hold Cambodia s seat at the United Nations Moreover a large number of Cambodians thought the Khmer Rouge was going to make a comeback in the s regain control of the country and repeat the nightmare Ear announced This fear persisted until the Khmer Rouge s final dissolution which did not occur until the end of the millennium Now years since the invasion both the Khmer Rouge and their Western apologists serve as a cautionary tale of the depths to which people can sink for their ideals Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance writer with an interest in Cambodian history He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune