Cambodian genocide denial

Cambodian genocide denial was the dispute among Western academics, journalists, and politicians about the character of the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Many Western scholars specializing in Cambodia denied or minimized the human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary information as "tales told by refugees." With conclusive evidence of a massive number of deaths of Cambodians caused by the Khmer Rouge, denials and deniers disappeared, although disagreements concerning the actual number of Khmer Rouge victims have continued.

The dispute is significant because it highlights the intellectual rifts in the post Vietnam War period in which the ideological convictions of anti-war academics often seemed to outweigh rational analysis.

Background

The Khmer Rouge (KR) captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on April 17, 1975 and immediately ordered all the residents to evacuate the city. "Between two and three million residents of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other big towns were forced by the communists to walk into the countryside... without organized provision for food, water, shelter, physical security or medical care." The evacuation probably resulted in at least 100,000 deaths. The dispossessed urban dwellers were assigned to re-education camps or "New Settlements." Former government employees and soldiers were executed. Soon, Cambodia resembled "a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor."

The Khmer Rouge guarded the border with Thailand and only a few thousand refugees were able to make their way to Thailand and safety. As no Westerners were allowed to visit Cambodia, those refugees plus the official news outlets of the Khmer Rouge were the principal source of information about conditions in Cambodia for the next four years.

The STAV

Many Western scholars believed that the KR would free Cambodia from colonialism, capitalism, and the ravages of American bombing and invasion during the Vietnam War. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-KR academics as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV). The STAV, which he said included among its adherents almost all Cambodian scholars in the Western world, "hoped for, more than anything, a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants, fighting imperialism, and revolution."

Despite the eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion of the brutal first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of refugees, most academics in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia, and other countries portrayed the Khmer Rouge favorably -- or, at least, were skeptical about the stories of KR atrocities. None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.

The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge heated up in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul in the popular magazine Reader's Digest. Based on extensive interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand, Barron and Paul estimated that, out of a total population of about 7 million people, 1.2 million Cambodians had died of starvation, over-work, or execution during less than two years of KR rule. Published about the same time was François Ponchaud's book, Cambodia: Year Zero. Ponchaud, a French priest, had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer. He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge. French scholar, Jean Lacouture, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in the New York Times Review of Books on March 31, 1977, and gave his personal mea culpa for his previous support for the Khmer Rouge.

Solarz hearing

On May 3, 1977, Congressman Stephen Solarz led a hearing on Cambodia in the United States House of Representatives. The witnesses were Barron and three academics. The most outspoken was Gareth Porter who had co-authored with George Hildebrand a highly positive book about the Khmer Rouge. Porter characterized the accounts of a million or more dead Cambodians as wildly exaggerated. He described the stories by refugees of KR atrocities collected by Barron and others as second-hand and hearsay. Asked for his sources, Porter cited the works of another adherent of the STAV, Ben Kiernan, an editor for a pro-Khmer Rouge publication in Australia. Porter never mentioned having spoken to any Cambodian refugees to evaluate their stories personally.

Solarz, who had visited Cambodian refugee camps and listened to refugees' stories of KR atrocities, characterized Porter's views about the Khmer Rouge as "cowardly and contemptible" and compared them to the justifications of the murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Chomsky

Linguist Noam Chomsky was among the academics who attempted to refute Barron, Paul, Ponchaud, and Lacouture. On June 6, 1977, he and his collaborator, Edward S. Herman, published a review of Barron and Paul's, Ponchaud's, and Porter's books in The Nation. He called Barron and Paul's book "third rate propaganda" and part of a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer Rouge. He said Ponchaud was "worth reading" but unreliable. Chomsky said that refugee stories of KR atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" as no independent verification was available. By contrast, Chomsky was highly favorable toward the book by Porter and Hildebrand, which portrayed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge as a "bucolic idyll." Chomsky also opined that the documentation of Gareth Porter's book was superior to that of Ponchaud's -- although almost all the references cited by Porter came from Khmer Rouge documents while Poncaud's came from Cambodian refugees.

Murder of Malcolm Caldwell

Malcolm Caldwell, a British academic, was an "unabashed cheerleader" for the Khmer Rouge. He was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers, two Americans and Caldwell, to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978—nearly four years after the KR had taken power. "We traveled in a bubble," wrote American journalist Elizabeth Becker. "No one was allowed to speak to me freely." On December 22, the three were staying at a guest house in Phnom Penh. Becker awakened during the night to the sound of gunfire and saw a Cambodian man with a gun. Later that night she and her colleague, Richard Dudman, were allowed by guards to venture out of their rooms and they discovered Caldwell's body. He had been shot and the body of a Cambodian man was also in his room.

The murder of Caldwell has never been fully explained. Four of the Cambodian guards were arrested and two "confessed" under torture. They said, "We were attacking to ruin the Khmer Rouge Party's policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world... it would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in support of our Party.... Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it." Whatever the motive behind Caldwell's murder, it seems highly unlikely that it could have occurred in tightly-controlled Cambodia without the involvement of high-level Khmer Rouge officials.

Three days later, December 25, 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and soon ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

The STAV disappears

With the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of more evidence of KR atrocities, including mass graves, the "tales told by refugees" proved to be true. As an intellectual movement the STAV quietly faded away. Some former enthusiasts for the Khmer Rouge recanted their previous views, others diverted their interest to other issues, and a few continued to defend the KR. Chomsky has continued to insist that his analysis was without error based on the information available to him at the time.

Gareth Porter signaled a change in his views in 1978. In a caustic exchange with author William Shawcross in the New York Review of Books on July 20, 1978, Porter admitted that the "policy of self reliance" of the Khmer Rouge "has imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia." Shawcross acknowledged Porter's change of view, but added that he should "be a little more careful before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of intellectual dishonesty."

Australian Ben Kiernan, recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979. He admitted that he had been "late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in Cambodia....and "wrong about...the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973."

Disputing the number of KR victims

Estimates of the number of Cambodians who died during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule range from less than one million to more than three million. Kiernan, head of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University, estimated 1.5 million died and later raised that estimate to 1.7 million. His deputy, Craig Etcheson undertook the most complete survey of mass graves and evidence of executions in Cambodia and concluded in 1999 that the KR executed about 1.5 million people and another 1.5 million died of starvation and overwork. In what was perhaps one last gasp of the STAV, Etcheson's conclusions were denounced by Kiernan and the Cambodian Genocide Project and his report was removed from the website.