$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 Yale University 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 Ben Kiernan 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 Howard Zinn 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 Khmer Rouge regime, which overwork, or denial of medical care. ruled Cambodia 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 Chams, 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 Genocide 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 religion 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 Pol Pot 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 Phnom Penh. In December 2004, the UN When Vietnam 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 the jungle 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 Ieng Sary'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- Ieng Thirith (Pol Pot's ex-sister-in-law), and lows a Khmer Rouge career that he began former DK Head of State Khieu Samphan, 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 French Communist Party. 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 Norodom Sihanouk 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 Hou Yuon 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 Lon Nol's, and then Vietnam. 1965, in the pages of the royalist magazine Jungle life, Samphan writes, imposed "habits Kambuja.