Post by caton on Feb 20, 2005 21:47:35 GMT -3
Dear Forum members,
John has recently wrote a moving list of his interventions in the name of freedom, of course. He unfortunately forgets to mention some antecedents, like –for example- the circuit of british weapons for diamonds in Sierra Leona, which fueled the killings. Of course his comment regarding Malvinas islands is as far away of truth as the above outpost of Empire from his Homeland.
Let’s have a look now to another one of those which he mentioned, the Cambodia issue.
Quote to John:
“1992 - With the UN in Cambodia.
Engaged in the field to end years of genocide and misery created by another despot to see the first truly democratic elections taking place in 1993”<br>
Western complicity in the Cambodian holocaust
Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
By Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005
320 pages, $39.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY TONY ILTIS
Commentators of the Gerard Henderson variety accuse the “left” of having supported Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (or Democratic Kampuchea) movement, which was responsible for the murder of between 1 and 2 million people when it ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Fawthrop and Jarvis’s painstakingly detailed examination of attempts since 1979 to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice demonstrates that the political establishments of the Western powers supported the Khmer Rouge for almost two decades after it was ousted from power.
In 1979 the Cold War was raging. It was the year of the Nicaraguan, Grenadan and Iranian revolutions, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the election that brought Ronald Reagan to power in the US.
Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam, which was not only a Soviet ally, but less than four years earlier had inflicted upon US imperialism the biggest military defeat in its history. For this reason, the Western powers and China ensured that the Khmer Rouge continued to represent Cambodia in the United Nations, so that UN and Western aid went not to Cambodia, but to Khmer Rouge-controlled refugee camps on the Thai border.
The principal backer of the Khmer Rouge while it was in power was China. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, Beijing initially tried to outflank Moscow from the left. It opposed the Soviet policies of detente and ‘‘peaceful coexistence’‘ and held up the Cultural Revolution (in reality the brutal consolidation of the personal dictatorship of Mao Zedong) as a radical attempt at creating a communist society.
However, following US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1971, China and the US began forging a strategic alliance against the Soviet Union. After the liberation of Cambodia, the US and China cooperated closely in their support of the Khmer Rouge. China’s support was open and unapologetic, however the US had to take public revulsion of Pol Pot into consideration, so its support was covert. For this reason Pol Pot himself was kept in the background and Khieu Samphan was promoted as the moderate face of the Khmer Rouge, even though he was a principal architect of the genocide.
The US administration instructed its diplomats and politicians not to be seen shaking hands with any Khmer Rouge leaders in public. Fawthrop and Jarvis recount Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s successful evasion of senior Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary’s attentions at a 1981 UN conference in New York designed to legitimise the Khmer Rouge!
John has recently wrote a moving list of his interventions in the name of freedom, of course. He unfortunately forgets to mention some antecedents, like –for example- the circuit of british weapons for diamonds in Sierra Leona, which fueled the killings. Of course his comment regarding Malvinas islands is as far away of truth as the above outpost of Empire from his Homeland.
Let’s have a look now to another one of those which he mentioned, the Cambodia issue.
Quote to John:
“1992 - With the UN in Cambodia.
Engaged in the field to end years of genocide and misery created by another despot to see the first truly democratic elections taking place in 1993”<br>
Western complicity in the Cambodian holocaust
Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
By Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005
320 pages, $39.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY TONY ILTIS
Commentators of the Gerard Henderson variety accuse the “left” of having supported Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (or Democratic Kampuchea) movement, which was responsible for the murder of between 1 and 2 million people when it ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Fawthrop and Jarvis’s painstakingly detailed examination of attempts since 1979 to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice demonstrates that the political establishments of the Western powers supported the Khmer Rouge for almost two decades after it was ousted from power.
In 1979 the Cold War was raging. It was the year of the Nicaraguan, Grenadan and Iranian revolutions, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the election that brought Ronald Reagan to power in the US.
Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam, which was not only a Soviet ally, but less than four years earlier had inflicted upon US imperialism the biggest military defeat in its history. For this reason, the Western powers and China ensured that the Khmer Rouge continued to represent Cambodia in the United Nations, so that UN and Western aid went not to Cambodia, but to Khmer Rouge-controlled refugee camps on the Thai border.
The principal backer of the Khmer Rouge while it was in power was China. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, Beijing initially tried to outflank Moscow from the left. It opposed the Soviet policies of detente and ‘‘peaceful coexistence’‘ and held up the Cultural Revolution (in reality the brutal consolidation of the personal dictatorship of Mao Zedong) as a radical attempt at creating a communist society.
However, following US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1971, China and the US began forging a strategic alliance against the Soviet Union. After the liberation of Cambodia, the US and China cooperated closely in their support of the Khmer Rouge. China’s support was open and unapologetic, however the US had to take public revulsion of Pol Pot into consideration, so its support was covert. For this reason Pol Pot himself was kept in the background and Khieu Samphan was promoted as the moderate face of the Khmer Rouge, even though he was a principal architect of the genocide.
The US administration instructed its diplomats and politicians not to be seen shaking hands with any Khmer Rouge leaders in public. Fawthrop and Jarvis recount Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s successful evasion of senior Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary’s attentions at a 1981 UN conference in New York designed to legitimise the Khmer Rouge!