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Home , Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Khieu Samphan, Michael Parenti

$4.95 THE LONG TERM VIEW Volume 6 A Journal of Informed Opinion Number 3 Thugs Who Have Run Governments in the Last Century

Lawrence R. Velvel Massachusetts School of Law

Craig R. MacPhee University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Kim Iskyan Writer

Randall Doyle Grand Valley State University

J. Peter Pham James Madison University

Ben Kiernan

Michael Parenti Author

Hua Lin Sun University of Texas

Steve C. Ropp University of Wyoming

Thomas K. Equels Attorney

Howard Zinn Boston University

Caroline Joan Picart Florida State University

David Harris Author

MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOL OF LAW PostScript Picture (0 74470 82220 2 63) at Andover THE LONG TERM VIEW

Volume 6, Number 3 Spring 2005 Thugs Who Have Run Governments in the Last Century

Table of Contents

Introduction Lawrence R. Velvel 3 The Legacy of Stalin in His Homeland Craig R. MacPhee 4 Putin: A Thug with a Cause? Kim Iskyan 10 Bully in the Pulpit: George W. Bush, America, and the World Randall Doyle 16 What's a Thug To Do? J. Peter Pham 25 Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Liberia's Charles Taylor Don't Blame Me, It Was My Prime Minister 32

Thugs Who Have Run Our Government Michael Parenti 37 An Interview with Michael Parenti Chairman Mao's China: The Great Leap Backward Hua Lin Sun 41 General Noriega's Journey from "Dictator" to "Thug": Steve C. Ropp 58 Changing U.S. Presidential Discourse and the Growing Tendency to Criminalize Foreign Leadership Behavior Interview with a Dictator Thomas K. Equels 65 Thugs Who Have Run Our Government 68 An Interview with Howard Zinn Of Nuns and Tanks, Angels and Demons: the Marcoses and the Caroline Joan Picart 70 People's Power Revolution Buying Loyalty in Iran David Harris 86 Don't Blame Me, It Was My Prime Minister

By Ben Kiernan

ol Pot's regime, which overwork, or denial of medical care. ruled from April 1975 to Those victims included not only one-sixth PJanuary 1979, subjected that country to of Cambodia's ethnic Khmer majority but also what was probably the world's most radical approximately 250,000 Chinese, 100,000 political, social, and economic revolution Muslim , all 10,000 ethnic Vietnamese ever. Cambodia was cut off from the outside civilians resident in Cambodia, members of world, foreign and minority languages the Thai and Lao minority groups, and per- banned, all neighboring countries militarily haps 50,000 Khmer Buddhist monks. Racial, attacked, cities emptied, schools and hospitals ethnic, and religious groups are protected by closed, the labor force conscripted, the econo- the Convention; the fate of the my militarized, currency, wages and markets Khmer majority population is covered by abolished, and most families separated, while international law prohibiting crimes against the majority Buddhist and other reli- humanity. gions and folk culture were suppressed and Although the Genocide Convention was places of worship substantially destroyed. enforced only rarely in the decades following For nearly four years, Democratic Kamp- its adoption by the UN in 1948, more recent uchea, as the regime named itself, enjoyed pursuit of international criminal justice, cul- almost total success in prohibiting freedom of minating in the establishment of the the press, movement, worship, organization, International Criminal Court in 2002, aims to association, and discussion. The Khmer deter such crimes in the future. However, Rouge leadership and its armed forces kid- prosecutions may also be nourishing a new napped a whole nation, then besieged it from genre, the evasive defendant memoir. Since within. Meals had to be eaten in collective 1993-94, when the UN first implemented the mess halls: parents ate breakfast in sittings, Genocide Convention by creating special Ad and if they were lucky, their sons and daugh- Hoc International Criminal Tribunals for ters waited their turns outside. Democratic Yugoslavia and Rwanda, perpetrators have Kampuchea (DK) was a prison camp state, spun tales of self-justification. The five-hour and eight million prisoners served most of courtroom harangue which Slobodan their time in forced labor and solitary confine- Milosevic delivered at his genocide trial in ment. In less than four years, 1.7 million of The Hague last year could become his first the inmates died of execution, starvation, draft of a self-serving autobiography. The

Ben Kiernan, A.Whitney Griswold professor of history and director of the Genocide Studies program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp), is the author of How Came to Power and The Pol Pot Regime, both published by Yale University Press.

32 KIERNAN trend may now spread as a United utes document his attendance at its high-level Nations/Cambodian tribunal prepares to open meetings during the genocide that followed. in . In December 2004, the UN When overthrew DK in 1979, appealed for international funding to help Samphan fled with Pol Pot to the Thai fron- establish Extraordinary Chambers in the tier. He surrendered in 1999 but still lives in Cambodian judicial system to try Khmer retirement and impunity on the border. Rouge leaders before Cambodian and interna- The UN and Cambodia have agreed to try tional judges. DK leaders in Cambodian courts with local Pol Pot, general secretary of the prosecutors and judges flanked by UN coun- Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) since terparts, who will be in a minority but will 1962 and DK prime minister from 1976 to wield veto power. Samphan's response is a 1979, died in in 1998 as the book, whose Khmer title means Cambodia's Cambodian army finally closed in on his fugi- Recent History and My Successive Stand- tive Khmer Rouge forces. Cambodia soon points. It recalls 's 1981 profession arrested the former DK army chief Chhit of innocence, which went, as Anthony Barnett Choeun (alias Mok) and prison commandant put it in the New Statesman, "Don't Blame Kang Khek Iev (alias Deuch). Six years later Me, It Was My Brother-in-law." Samphan both men are still in jail awaiting trial, but claims, similarly, that until recently he knew others remain at large. Pol Pot's deputy Nuon little of the genocide and participated in none Chea, the CPK No. 3 Ieng Sary, Sary's wife of the decisions that led to it. His denial fol- (Pol Pot's ex-sister-in-law), and lows a Khmer Rouge career that he began former DK Head of State , are with an eight-year stint in the company of now expected to be indicted. Khieu Samphan their insurgent leadership, before presiding as stands out as the figurehead of the Khmer Head of State over the genocide, and then Rouge regime. spending the subsequent two decades in the The son of a judge, Samphan studied in company of the defeated DK leaders. Paris in the 1950s just after Pol Pot did. Both The glossy Khmer-language edition is lav- men joined the . Pol ish for a Cambodian paperback, with color Pot failed his radio-electricity course, but photographs of Samphan sporting pastels and Samphan earned a doctorate with an intelli- open-necked shirts. The French publisher's gent economics dissertation at the University blurb lauds his evasions as "modesty." An of Paris. Back home, Samphan established a English translation from the French is also on newspaper, and Cambodia's then ruler Prince Phnom Penh streets, in time for international assigned him a parlia- judges to pick up a copy. The preface by mentary seat. He became Economy Minister, Samphan's attorney, Jacques Vergès, lawyer but resigned under pressure from opponents for Klaus Barbie and Saddam Hussein, makes of his nationalizing reforms. By 1966, right- a shining start by likening Samphan to André ists dominated the parliament, and civil war Malraux or Anthony Eden. loomed. The next year Samphan took to the As in any self-serving explanation, jungle to join Pol Pot's insurgents. They Samphan quotes himself at length. Following defeated Sihanouk's successor, General Lon one two-page self-quotation, he re-quotes a Nol, in 1975. Samphan became Head of State paragraph, then reproduces the lot in of the Khmer Rouge regime and joined the Appendix 2. Yet eight pages are missing from Standing Committee of the ruling CPK's the Khmer edition, while the French contains Central Committee. Standing Committee min- typographical errors and reduces the Khmer

33 THE LONG TERM VIEW phrase for the Marxist term "dialectical mate- considered a peasant become one of the rialism" to simply "la dialectique." That mis- important leaders of a national resistance translation could be Samphan's own: such movement." Samphan went along with the cases of losing the "materialism" were com- Party's restrictions, while his more independ- mon in the often anti-materialist, Maoist, and ent companion rejected them. racist CPK. Yet Samphan expects Cambodians to pity Cambodia has agreed at UN insistence to him for those years in the hills without good seek no pardon for anyone the tribunal con- food or medicine, when he missed his mother, victs. Samphan's autobiography, replete with and for the constant mobility required by the adulation of King Sihanouk, who was re- wars the CPK pursued with his support (reit- crowned in 1993 but late in 2003 abdicated in erated here), when in turn the CPK attacked favor of his son, seems to be angling for a and refused to negotiate with Sihanouk's royal pardon. Samphan writes as if he is in regime, then 's, and then Vietnam. 1965, in the pages of the royalist magazine Jungle life, Samphan writes, imposed "habits Kambuja. He lauds the throne, ignores facts, of isolation and lack of freedom of movement rewards allies, and demolishes straw men. which were my lot." Samphan thinks people (Samphan criticizes me for quoting Cam- will believe that only patriotism kept him bodian refugee testimony, but I've had worse going, and that he accepted the job of Head of from the Khmer Rouge.) Like most State after the 1975 CPK victory only out of Cambodians, Sihanouk has since seen every- duty to his country. thing, but unlike them, Samphan has learned It is astonishing that he pleads near-total little. Having taken to the jungle, he emerged ignorance of the genocide which occurred 32 years later without much to add. Vainly when he was Head of State (1976-1979). He discreet, he seems unaware how much docu- claims that rarely-specified "Khmer Rouge mentation of the internal workings of his leaders" (not him) bore sole responsibility for regime is now in the public domain. those deeds and failed to keep him informed. In his awe of authority, Samphan evinces For all DK's crimes, which he is shocked little regret even for his association with (shocked!) to discover now, Samphan expects prospective co-defendants like the Khmer sympathy from the surviving victims. Rouge army commander, Mok. He says he Though based at CPK headquarters, for first met Mok in 1967, after accepting the instance, Samphan claims he was "profoundly advice of the CPK leaders to join them in the upset" by his Party's forced evacuation of jungle. In a peasant hut that evening, Phnom Penh on its fall in April 1975. While Samphan found Mok dressed "like all the others like Hou Yuon opposed it, Samphan peasants," in black shorts and an unbuttoned calls the evacuation something "I was not short-sleeved shirt. "The diffuse glow of the expecting at all." Meanwhile the CPK had lamp nevertheless revealed to us the deep and forcibly collectivized the countryside. "Great piercing eyes which stood out on his bearded was my surprise," he claims, on learning this face. . . . He asked affably about our trip and soon after the 1975 victory. Until then he recommended that we never leave the house." could have been the sole Cambodian in the By contrast Mok himself "moved about freely countryside unaware of its collectivization. . . . sometimes bare-chested, revealing his Documentary evidence belies Samphan's hairy chest and arms. . . . In fact, in the face of claimed ignorance of high-level policy at his activity, I became well aware of my limits. every turn. He admits to full membership of And more deeply, I felt pride to see this man I the CPK Central Committee from 1976, but

34 KIERNAN not of its powerful Standing Committee (SC). victim, Samphan claims Nim as "my friend" He says he attended only "enlarged" SC meet- and recoils at the "suffering in his soul and in ings. However the extant minutes for 1975-76 his body, what a nightmare." This perform- record Samphan in attendance at 12 of 14 SC ance cannot convince us of Samphan's meetings (gatherings not "enlarged" by lesser claimed "naïveté"—or that at the time he "was invitees). Samphan indeed attended the CPK's unaware even of the existence" of "massacres closed, high-level deliberations. and crimes." After the point when he now concedes Samphan tries to blame Cambodia's learning of the urban deportations and rural tragedy, including the genocide carried out by collectivization, party documents reveal not his own Party, on its Vietnamese opponents, a only Samphan's important role in the regime, racist false memory still fomented in but his awareness of looming purges. On Cambodian politics. Denouncing 's per- October 9, 1975, he attended the SC meeting fidy, he explains away DK's slaughter of at which it appointed itself as Cambodia's Vietnamese civilians in cross-border raids and secret government. The minutes rank silently ignores its genocide of Cambodia's Samphan fourth in the cabinet hierarchy, after Vietnamese minority. In one glimpse of Pol Pot, , and Ieng Sary. At this humanity, Samphan describes hospitals "over- closed meeting, Pol Pot targeted a general, flowing" and men "covered with blood, Chan Chakrey: "We must pay attention to groaning through the wards," a sight that what he says, to see [if] he is a traitor who will "tears blocked my eyes from seeing. I was lit- deprive himself of any future." Then, moving erally undone." However, these patients were also against Chakrey's deputy, Pol Pot added: not Cambodia's genocide victims, but DK "we must be totally silent . . . we must watch troops back from fighting on the border. their activities." As Samphan surely anticipat- Samphan understands the use of to ed, Pol Pot soon ordered both men assassinat- shore up power and obscure misdeeds. As late ed. This action launched massive purges that as 1992, he threatened more ethnic violence killed thousands of other CPK members and by invoking 1970 massacres that had choked innocents. As Pol Pot had instructed, his tame the with bodies of ethnic Head of State was "totally silent" about Vietnamese. Blackmailing the UN to accept Chakrey and his deputy at that time. He Khmer Rouge demands, Samphan warned remains so now. that a recurrence of the 1970 killings "might Samphan was not so quiet about the fate of become a reality." Khmer Rouge slaughter of , a leftist parliamentarian, who unlike Vietnamese, Cambodians, and UN peace- Samphan, protested DK policies and was keepers re-commenced months later. arrested in April 1977. Nim's torturer report- Visionary or instigator, Samphan knew more ed: "we whipped him four or five times to then than he is letting on now. break his stand, before taking him to be Samphan is honest about one thing: he stuffed with water." Samphan may not have lacked the courage to criticize DK from its read that report, but knowing Nim was in dan- inner circle. "I could not bring myself to raise ger, he stated on radio the next day: "We must my voice to express my opposition to the vio- wipe out the enemy . . . neatly and thorough- lences . . . perpetrated in my name," he recalls. ly . . . and suppress all stripes of enemy at all This rings true. In his 1963 economic reform times." On July 6, CPK security forces massa- campaign, Samphan won a cabinet vote of cred Hu Nim and 126 others. Posing now as a confidence but suddenly resigned. He now

35 THE LONG TERM VIEW claims he was fired. Mesmerized by power, Samphan just lacked nerve. Hou Yuon and Hu Nim fought harder and were sacked, yet kept pushing for reforms. When they later spoke out against Pol Pot, he murdered them. By contrast, Samphan's career betrays a wooden, tone-deaf irresolution that surfaces in his book as moral cowardice. The memoir of a man perched atop a genocidal regime has its own surreal logic. It reveals almost nothing of the carnage of his people, antiseptically conced- ing that atrocities occurred while withholding their details and authorship. ‹

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