Cambodian genocide denial is the belief expressed by some academics that early claims of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979) in Democratic Kampuchea were exaggerated. Many scholars of Cambodia and intellectuals opposed to the United States involvement in the Vietnam War denied or minimized reports of human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary reports as "tales told by refugees" and US propaganda. They viewed the assumption of power by the Communist Party of Kampuchea as a positive development for the people of Cambodia who had been severely impacted by the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War.
Scholar Donald W. Beachler, writing of the controversy about the range and extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities, concluded that "much of the posturing by academics, publicists, and politicians seems to have been motivated largely by political purposes" rather than concern for the Cambodian people.Beachler, Donald W. (2009) "Arguing about Cambodia: Genocide and Political Interest" Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23(2):214–38. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-Khmer Rouge academics as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV).
With conclusive evidence, including the discovery of over 20,000 mass graves, of a large number of deaths—estimated at between one and three million—of Cambodians caused by the Khmer Rouge, denials, deniers, and apologists largely disappeared, although disagreements concerning the actual number of Khmer Rouge victims have continued.
Overview Background
The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on 17 April 1975, and immediately ordered all the residents to evacuate the city. Between two and three million residents of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other large 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, according to journalists, 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 safety in Thailand. As virtually no Westerners were allowed to visit Cambodia, those refugees plus the official news outlets of the Khmer Rouge were the principal sources of information about conditions in Cambodia for the next four years.
Within one day of the Communists taking power, Fernand Scheller, chief of the United Nations development project in Phnom Penh stated, "What the Khmer Rouge are doing is pure genocide. ... What is going on now is an example of demagoguery that makes one vomit."
"Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" Donald W. Beachler has described the late 1970s debate about the character of the Khmer Rouge as follows:Many of those who had been opponents of U.S. military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia feared that the tales of murder and deprivation under the Khmer Rouge regime would validate the claims of those who had supported U.S. government actions aimed at halting the spread of communism. Conservatives pointed to the actions of the Khmer Rouge as proof of the inherent evils of communism and evidence that the U.S. had been right to fight its long war against communists in Southeast Asia.Despite the eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion during the first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of refugees; many 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 Khmer Rouge atrocities. None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia until the final few days of Khmer Rouge rule (except Gunnar Bergstrom, president of the Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association) and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false. According to Joel Brinkley, "Khmer Rouge apologists easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way."
Some Western scholars believed that the Khmer Rouge 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-Khmer Rouge intelligentsia 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." Author William Shawcross was another critic of the STAV academics. Shawcross's views were endorsed and summarized by human-rights activist David Hawk, who claimed that the West was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia due to "the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories."Herman, Edward S., and Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Random House. p. 292
The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge intensified in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts in Reader's Digest magazine from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul called Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia (printed in the US as Murder Of A Gentle Land). 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 Khmer Rouge rule. Published about the same time was the book Cambodge Année Zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero) by François Ponchaud, a French priest who had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer. He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge, and asked: "How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?"
French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a fervent sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in The New York Review of Books on 31 March 1977. In 1978, Lacouture wrote Cambodians Survive!, in which he said:The shame, alone, would have justified that this book be written—which is firstly a cry of horror. The shame of having contributed, even as little as it was, as weak as its influence could have been on the mass media, to the establishment of one of the most oppressive powers history has ever known.Lacouture, Jean. 1978. Cambodians Survive!. Sections of the academic left in the West dismissed and/or opposed both Ponchaud's and Barron and Paul's books; Noam Chomsky called the latter book a "third rate propaganda tract."Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. 1977 June 6. "Distortions at Fourth Hand." The Nation. – via Chomsky.info. Retrieved 6 June 2021. Gareth Porter was the most outspoken of the dissenting academics. In 1976, he and George Hildebrand co-authored Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, in which Porter characterized the accounts of a million-or-more dead Cambodians as wildly exaggerated.Porter, Gareth, and Hildebrand, George C. 1976. Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Monthly Review Press. Testifying before the U.S Congress in 1977, Porter stated, "I cannot accept the premise…that one million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people.""Human Rights in Cambodia." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 1st Session. 1977 May 3. Also available via Google Books. Regarding Porter and Hildebrand's 1976 book, Shawcross wrote a review in which he stated that the authors' "use of evidence can be seriously questioned," and that "their apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing the lies that governments tell."
In addition to Chomsky, Porter, and Hildebrand, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge have also been denied and/or whitewashed by such academics as Marxist scholar Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers,Summers, Laura. 1976. "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia." Current History 71(422):213–17. . p. 215. Edward S. Herman, and Torben Retbøll.Ezra, Michael. 2009. "Malcolm Caldwell: Pol Pot’s Apologist." Democratiya 16(Spring/Summer 2009):155–78.
Samir Amin Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin was long an influence on and supporter of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, becoming acquainted with the Khmer Rouge's future leaders in post-World War II Paris, where Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and other Cambodian students were studying. Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis, which he finished in 1959, noted collaborations with Amin and claimed to apply Amin's theories to Cambodia. In the late 1970s, Amin praised the Khmer Rouge as superior to Marxist movements in China, Vietnam, or the Soviet Union, and recommended the Khmer Rouge model for Africa.
Amin continued to actively praise the Khmer Rouge into the 1980s. At a 1981 talk in Tokyo, Amin praised Pol Pot's work as "one of the major successes of the struggle for socialism in our era" and as necessary against "expansionism" from the Soviet Union or from Vietnam. Some scholars, such as Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough, have noted that Khmer Rouge activists in Paris in the 1950s already held ideas of eliminating counter-revolutionaries and organizing a party center whose decisions could not be questioned. Despite contemporary reports of mass killings committed by the Khmer Rouge, Amin argued in 1986 that "the cause of the most evil to the people of Kampuchea" lay elsewhere:The humanitarian argument is in the final analysis the argument offered by all the colonialists ... Isn't [the cause of evil] first of all the American imperialists and Lon Nol? Isn't it today the Vietnamese army and their project of colonizing Kampuchea?
Solarz hearing On 3 May 1977, Congressman Stephen Solarz led a hearing on Cambodia in the United States House of Representatives. The witnesses were John Barron and three academics who specialized in Cambodia: David P. Chandler, who would become perhaps the most prominent American scholar of Cambodia; Peter Poole; and Gareth Porter. Chandler believed that "bloodbath" was an accurate description of the situation and by no means an exaggeration.
Porter again stated that the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities were much exaggerated: "I cannot accept the premise…that one million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people." Porter described the stories by refugees of Khmer Rouge atrocities collected by Barron and others as second-hand and hearsay. Asked for his sources, Porter cited the works of Ben Kiernan, who as a student was 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 Khmer Rouge atrocities, characterized justifications and explanations during the hearing 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 and Herman
1977 The Nation article