Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley

believed that, to be fair, he should be heard, too.
    At that time, Porter was one of the most prominent Khmer Rouge champions in the United States. In Europe, meantime, Khmer Rouge apologists easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way. These people had been vociferous opponents of the Vietnam War—particularly the bombing of Cambodia. One certainty united
most of them. The bombing, more than anything else, had inevitably led to the state of affairs in Cambodia. And to them, whatever the U.S. government had to say now was per force a lie. If the regime in Phnom Penh was anti-American, it could only be worthy of admiration.
    The climate of distrust surrounding the Vietnam War had spread to Cambodia. Porter later explained that as a student journalist, “I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing” on the Vietnam War. “They were lying.” If government officials had been so dishonest about Vietnam, why should anyone believe anything they had to say about Cambodia?
    Elsewhere at the time, Porter claimed in public that Twining and others in the Bangkok embassy “had predicted that millions of people would starve to death once the United States pulled out of Cambodia. When the regime clearly averted mass starvation, these people would have lost face. So they created the genocide claim.” At about this time, Ieng Sary, Cambodia’s foreign minister, told an Italian interviewer that “the Khmer revolution has no precedents,” and those who claimed that Cambodia had executed hundreds of thousands of people “are crazy. Only hardened criminals have been sentenced.”
    Before the subcommittee Porter said simply that it was “a myth that between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians have been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” This falsehood, he added, grew out of self-serving government statements and irresponsible reporting in recent newspaper articles and books. 2
    A few weeks earlier Noam Chomsky, an author and academic, offered an article in the Nation that conflated the American bombing and the Khmer Rouge horrors and made the same broad argument
as the other apologists. He cited “highly qualified specialists” whom he did not name, but “who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands.” He also claimed that “these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attacks) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports, and the need to treat them with great caution.”
    Reflecting on the hearing, Twining said, “It was easy to tell them what I knew but impossible to tell them what to do about it. I felt helpless.” Despite Porter’s testimony, Solarz said the hearing had helped him convince the House to pass a resolution “calling on the Carter administration to coordinate with other nations to free the Cambodian people. But of course it had no effect.”

    I n February 1978, almost three years into the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the Washington Post ’s Lewis Simons wrote a news analysis summing up his experience as a Southeast Asia correspondent. He conceded, first of all, that neither he nor anyone else really knew what was happening in Cambodia. If that is so, he wrote, “Why do most Americans assume that the Cambodian Communists run the most brutal regime since the Nazis? Is the answer, as the Cambodians and their tiny handful of foreign friends allege, that Western governments and news media are guilty of ‘distortions and wild fabrications?’” Not necessarily, he concluded. But in that case,