Lost in Cambodia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/10/malcolm-caldwell-pol-pot-murder
Why did a radical British professor become a cheer-leader for Pol
Pot? And why was he murdered on the very day he'd met the brutal
dictator? Andrew Anthony on the extraordinary life and death of
Malcolm Caldwell
Andrew Anthony
10 January 2010
The name of Malcolm Caldwell is remembered now by very few people:
some friends, family, colleagues, and students of utopian folly. In
the 1970s, though, Caldwell was a major figure in protest politics.
He was chair of CND for two years, a leading voice in the
anti-Vietnam war campaign, a regular contributor to Peace News, and a
stalwart supporter of liberation movements in the developing world.
He spoke at meetings all over the country, wrote books and articles,
and engaged in public spats with such celebrated opponents as Bernard Levin.
The name of Kaing Guek Eav is, arguably, known by even fewer people,
at least outside of Cambodia. Instead it is by his revolutionary
pseudonym "Duch" that Kaing is usually referred to in the press. Duch
is the only man ever to stand trial in a UN-sanctioned court for the
mass murder perpetrated by the Cambodian communist party, or the
Khmer Rouge, in the late 1970s. His trial on charges of crimes
against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and
homicide and torture concerning thousands of victims, drew to a close
in November. Justice has taken more than 30 years, but a verdict and
sentence are expected sometime in the next few weeks.
Although their paths crossed only incidentally, the two men shared
two main interests. They both had a pedagogic background: Caldwell
was a history lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), University of London, while Duch, like many senior Khmer
Rouge cadres, started out as a schoolteacher. And they both
maintained an unbending belief in Saloth Sar, the leader of the Khmer
Rouge revolution, who went under the Orwellian party title of Brother
Number One, but was known more infamously to the world as Pol Pot. It
was an ideological commitment that would shape the fate of both men
and they held on to it right up until the moment of death in
Caldwell's case, his own, for Duch, the many thousands whose
slaughter he organised.
In each circumstance, the question that reverberates down the years,
growing louder rather than dimmer, is: why? Why were they in thrall
to a system based on mass extermination? It's estimated that around
two million Cambodians, more than a quarter of the population, lost
their lives during the four catastrophic years of Khmer Rouge rule.
What could have led these two individuals, worlds apart, to embrace a
regime that has persuasive claim, in a viciously competitive field,
to be the most monstrous of the 20th century?
When Caldwell appeared at SOAS for an interview in the late 1950s,
the senior faculty thought that they had landed one of the academic
stars of the future. Caldwell, who took his PhD at Nottingham
University, had gained a reputation as a bright young talent and,
according to college legend, he presented himself as a sober scholar.
"So they hired him," recalls Merle Ricklefs, a former SOAS colleague
and now a history professor at the National University of Singapore.
"Then he showed up for lectures and suddenly he was this Scottish
radical with long hair, looking unkempt, and they felt as though
they'd been betrayed.
"I thought he was actually a very good economic historian," says
Ricklefs, who remembers "an extraordinary character
very
ideologically committed". He was also struck by his warmth and good
manners. As a young American, who dressed in conservative fashion,
arriving in England during the height of the Vietnam war, Ricklefs
expected to be greeted with a certain amount of antipathy, but he
found Caldwell to be "always cordial. Always looking slightly
dishevelled and revolutionary, but never the slightest hint of discourtesy."
The picture of a friendly, if rather unconventional character, is
confirmed by others who knew him. Professor Ian Brown was Caldwell's
successor at SOAS and he was also his former student. "He was well
liked I suspect not by the SOAS hierarchy," says Brown, "but
certainly loved by students and colleagues."
He describes a "skinny, somewhat emaciated, rather scruffy character
who, bizarrely, always used to wear a suit though it was clearly a
suit that had been bought in the 1950s equivalent of Oxfam and not
seen too many dry cleaners." Caldwell never hid his politics from his
students, indeed he made a point of proselytising to them. One of his
protégés was Walter Easey, who, according to Easey's obituarist,
Caldwell converted to "a fierce and angry communism". But to
Professor Brown, "he was a gentle person, quietly spoken, and very
tolerant of opposing views. He treated everyone well. He was very
encouraging and a really inspiring teacher."
Both Brown and Ricklefs use the same word to describe this
well-travelled, extremely well-read and highly intelligent man:
naive. SOAS, says Brown, was a college whose standing and ethos
rested upon sound empirical study. "Everyone else in the history
department went off every summer to the archives in Rangoon, Baghdad,
etc, and got deep inside the data. Malcolm didn't. He was a man with
very clear theoretical and ideological views and the empirical basis
didn't seem to worry him hugely."
It's not that Caldwell was lost in bookish abstraction, for he did
visit the various communist regimes he extolled. It was more that
when he got there he was all too willing to accept state propaganda
as verified fact. For example, he praised the "magnitude of the
economic achievements" of Kim Il-Sung's impoverished North Korea and,
returning from a trip to the highly secretive state, he wrote that
the country was "an astonishing tribute not only to the energy,
initiative and creativeness of the Korean people, but also to the
essential correctness of the Juche line". "Juche" was the mixture of
ultra-nationalism and self-reliance on which Kim built his monumental
personality cult. About the totalitarian surveillance and ruthless
political repression, Caldwell said nothing.
Although academic traditionalists may have disapproved of Caldwell's
slanted scholarship, many idealistic students were inspired by his
lectures. Tariq Ali, who became famous as a 1968 student leader,
recalls going to see him talk on southeast Asia when Ali was at
Oxford. They soon got to know each other and in the summer of 1965
went to a peace conference together in Helsinki. "We had to fly to
Moscow," says Ali, "then there was a train, via Leningrad as it was
then, to Helsinki. We talked a lot and became very friendly. It was
later on that his Cambodian deviation was a bit off-putting. And he
could never completely explain it."
At one time, the pair discussed opening a Vietnamese restaurant as a
sort of act of antiwar gastro-prop. "He would say that after a few
drams," Ali recalls. "He was a great whisky drinker. He was also a
great cricket fan and an early Scottish nationalist."
Cricket is mostly followed in Scotland by the upper classes, but Ali
got the impression that his old friend came from a middle-class
background. His Wikipedia entry states that he was the son of a
miner. "You know," says Ali, "we never bothered about these things.
We were so totally immersed in politics and the state of the world,
we never really talked about each other, our personal lives or social
backgrounds."
In seeking to understand why this idealistic Scotsman became a
cheerleader for Pol Pot, it would be wrong to consign him to the
maverick margins. A member of the Labour Party, he stood as a
candidate in the 1977 local elections in Bexley. John Cox, who
followed in Caldwell's footsteps as chair of CND, is adamant that
there was nothing out of the ordinary about his predecessor's
politics. "He was well in the mainstream of what I would call
generally progressive liberal thinking," says Cox.
This idea that support for the most illiberal systems of government
is all part of the liberal tradition is one of the more bemusing
aspects of progressive politics. But the missing factor in the
equation is the view that the United States of America is the
ultimate villain. The background to the brutality visited on Cambodia
was the brutality visited on Vietnam by US forces.
Although the Vietnam war was more complex than is often acknowledged
(the tensions between North and South, for example, long predated the
war), the Americans essentially inherited France's colonial conflict.
But they fought it in the context of the Cold War. As much as US
administrations may have seen the battle as one between communism and
the free world, to the majority of Vietnamese it was a liberation struggle.
In an effort to close down North Vietnamese supply lines to the
South, the US also launched a devastating bombing campaign on
neighbouring Cambodia. Instead of winning the war in the former, it
served only to destabilise the latter. To make matters worse, an
American-supported coup put in place the corrupt government of Lon
Nol in Phnom Penh. So there was a tendency among many anti-war
protesters to see the Khmer Rouge as just another national liberation
movement, fighting to escape from under the American yoke.
One man who observed the truth up close, four years before the Khmer
Rouge came to power, was a French ethnologist called François Bizot.
In 1971, while out researching Buddhist practices, he was captured in
the Cambodian countryside by Khmer Rouge insurgents. He was held
captive with scores of Cambodian prisoners at the M-13 prison camp, a
precursor to the 196 santebal (secret police) offices that were set
up after the Khmer Rouge seized power. The head of the camp, and the
Frenchman's tireless interrogator, was Duch.
Bizot wrote about the encounter in a remarkable memoir called The
Gate. After three months, during which he was shackled and repeatedly
accused of being an American spy, he was suddenly released all the
other prisoners were executed. So relieved was the Frenchman that he
asked Duch if he would like a gift. His jailer thought for a while
and then replied, "with the look of a child writing to Father
Christmas, 'The complete collection of Das Kapital by Marx.'"
Three days before Christmas in 1978, Malcolm Caldwell received an
early present. On the final day of a two-week tour of Cambodia, he
was told that he would meet Pol Pot. This was indeed a rare
privilege. Unlike most other communist leaders, Pol had not created a
personality cult. There were no posters of him. He was seldom seen or
quoted. Many Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven
westerners were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic
Kampuchea. And Caldwell was the first and only Briton.
There were several reasons why Caldwell had been received in Phnom
Penh. He was on good terms with China, Cambodia's main ally in the
region. There were also growing tensions between Cambodia and its
larger neighbour Vietnam and, fearful of an invasion, Pol Pot was
belatedly attempting to improve Kampuchea's image abroad. Most of
all, while other supporters had wavered, Caldwell had remained
steadfast. Only months before, he had written an article in the
Guardian, rubbishing reports of a Khmer Rouge genocide. He cited Hu
Nim, the Kampuchean Information Minister, who blamed the deaths on
America. Caldwell was unaware that Hu had himself already been
tortured to death in one of Pol Pot's execution centres. Such
killings that the Khmer Rouge had committed, argued the peace
activist, were of "arch-Quislings who well knew what their fate would
be were they to linger in Kampuchea".
Travelling with Caldwell were two American journalists, Elizabeth
Becker and Richard Dudman. Becker had been a foreign reporter in
Phnom Penh during the civil war that brought the Khmer Rouge to
power. She knew the terrain, and had been to Thailand to talk to
refugees. She and Caldwell argued endlessly about the true nature of
the situation.
"He didn't want to know about problems with the Khmer Rouge," she
says. "And that carried over to not wanting to know about problems
between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was stuck in '68 or something."
Yet for all their disagreements, she liked Caldwell. "He was a lovely
man, very funny, very charming," she says. "A real sweetie. He was
also very homesick for his family and he said he'd never spend
another Christmas away from them."
According to Becker, Caldwell had not read François Ponchaud's
Cambodia: Year Zero, the book that first catalogued the Khmer Rouge
genocide. A friend of François Bizot, Ponchaud was a Catholic
missionary who was in Phnom Penh when the victorious Khmer Rouge army
marched into town. His book became required reading for anyone
interested in what was happening in Cambodia. "The fact that Malcolm,
a professor, had not read it before he went, that I couldn't
believe," says Becker. "I think it was almost ideological that he
didn't read it."
It's perhaps not that strange that Caldwell had neglected to read
Ponchaud, given that he had already dismissed the Frenchman's
credibility in print. He based his damning opinion on a brief extract
of Year Zero which the Guardian had published and a critique of the
book by the American academic, Noam Chomsky. An icon of radical
dissent who continues to command a fanatical following, Chomsky had
questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that provided much of
Ponchaud's research. Chomsky believed that their stories were
exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved
in a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer
Rouge government, "including systematic distortion of the truth".
He compared Ponchaud's work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia:
Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth
Porter, which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish
lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the
same time Chomsky excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land,
by two Reader's Digest writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which
was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide
taking place.
We can never know if Caldwell would have taken Ponchaud more
seriously had Chomsky not been so sceptical, but it's reasonable to
surmise that the Scotsman, who greatly admired Chomsky, was reassured
by the American's contempt. In any case, the 47-year-old Caldwell
arrived in Cambodia untroubled by the story that Ponchaud and others
had to tell. In fact, he had just completed a book himself that would
be posthumously published as Kampuchea: A Rationale for a Rural
Policy, in which he wrote that the Khmer Rouge revolution "opens
vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the
peoples of all other poor third world countries".
With Dudman and Becker, Caldwell was escorted around the country to a
series of staged scenes. Alarmed by the changes she saw and
frustrated by what she was not allowed to see, Becker grew
increasingly combative with her hosts. "It was so clearly awful,"
says Becker. "One of the problems was the absence of what I saw. The
absence of people. And that's a different kind of proof to 'I don't
see any people being executed.'"
Caldwell was not unduly bothered. "He preferred to stay in the car
and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us," Becker
wrote in her book on Cambodia, When The War Was Over.
"He'd travelled to other communist countries," she tells me now, "and
he knew exactly what the PR routine was and he thought that all
governments do PR. He did not know Cambodia, and he didn't speak the
language. If you don't speak the language, don't know the country,
you can edit out a little more easily."
At the end of the tour, the party returned to Phnom Penh, which
Dudman described as "a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii
without the ashes". They stayed at a guest house near the centre of
Monivong Boulevard, one of the empty city's main thoroughfares. Close
by was the secret facility of Tuol Sleng, a former school that had
been turned into an interrogation centre. Known as S-21, Tuol Sleng
specialised in gaining confessions through torture. Between 14,000
and 16,000 prisoners men, women and, most hauntingly, children
passed through its gates, including Hu Nim. Only seven survived. It
was run by Duch.
Nowadays Tuol Sleng is a genocide museum, and an established part of
the southeast Asian tourist trail. Although they were intent on
erasing history, Pol Pot and his senior cadres were obsessed with the
accomplishments of the 12th-century Hindu dynasty that built the
temple complex of Angkor Wat and constructed elaborate damn and
irrigation systems. They considered their own contribution to Khmer
culture to be of a similar, if not greater, significance. It speaks
eloquently of the Khmer Rouge's achievements that, while Angkor Wat
remains the country's main tourist attraction, the next most popular
sights for visitors are Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields at Choeung
Ek, where the prisoners from S-21 were taken to be "smashed"
usually with an ox-cart axle. A ghost town under the Khmer Rouge,
Phnom Penh is now a bustling, sprawling city, dense with people and
commercial activity. In May 1975, one month after the Khmer Rouge
evacuated the capital, the Swedish author Per Olov Enquist wrote:
"The brothel has been emptied and the clean-up is in progress. Only
pimps can regret what is happening."
If that was blatant wishful thinking, it's an unpalatable truth that
the pimps have returned. A potent mix of Developing World poverty,
cheap flights and sexual licence has made Cambodia a magnet for sex
tourists and paedophiles. The upmarket hotels around the riverside
are full of western and Japanese businessmen, and a certain kind of
furtive middle-aged traveller, stubble-chinned and plump-stomached,
is a conspicuous presence in the bars and clubs frequented by young
and under-age prostitutes.
Cambodia has just two seasons: wet and dry. It either rains or it
doesn't, a binary climate that may have helped shape the Khmer Rouge
Manichean view of the world revolutionary or counter-revolutionary,
insider or outsider, good or bad. It was the dry season when I
visited in late November, and a cooling wind blew through the hot,
polluted streets. At first sight, Tuol Sleng's large courtyard, lined
with coconut palms, provides welcome respite from the noise beyond. A
respectful silence is maintained by visitors, including groups of
western backpackers, with their cameras and guidebook glaze. The
three-storey buildings have been left pretty much as they were
abandoned in 1979, slightly dilapidated with jerry-built cells,
barbed-wire fences and medieval instruments of torture. The effect is
to transport the visitor not just back in time, but also into the
reptilian depths of the imagination, a merciless place of zero compassion.
In the courtyard of the prison is a poster listing the rules of the
camp. None of them makes for pleasant reading. For example, number 2
states in an imperfect translation: "Don't try to hide the facts by
making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest
me." It vividly articulates the mentality that shaped S-21, and
indeed Kampuchea beyond, the relentless determination to remove every
option from the prisoner and citizen to reduce them to absolute
compliance. But perhaps the most disturbing is number 6: "While
getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all."
Denied every human and judicial right, the inmates were also refused
the one prerogative of the tortured: the right to express pain.
I visited the archive on the second floor of the building, where some
of the 4,000 files the Vietnamese discovered are housed. Here, I was
brought the "confession" of John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from
Newcastle who was captured in 1978, while sailing with friends
through the Gulf of Thailand. Intercepted by a Khmer Rouge patrol
boat, they were placed in S-21 and tortured over the course of a
month. As the weeks passed, Dewhirst made a series of ever more
bleakly surreal confessions. They start out as straightforward
biography he explains that he had studied at Loughborough
university. Then he admits to being a CIA agent, recruited at
Loughborough where the CIA, he is made to say, maintains one of its
covert training bases. It "was housed in a building disguised as the
Loughborough Town Council Highways Department Surveyor's Office". He
also reveals that his father is another CIA agent, using the cover of
"headmaster of Benton Road secondary school". Dewhirst was murdered
by the Khmer Rouge in 1978.
S-21 was not concerned with the truth. Its only aim was to derive the
fullest possible confession in accordance with party requirements. In
his book Voices From S-21, the historian David Chandler quotes Milan
Kundera's phrase (used to describe the Soviet bloc secret police) of
"punishment seeking the crime" to sum up the prison's project. To
this end, the most depraved techniques electric shocks, rape, the
forced eating of excrement, medical experimentation, flaying, and
lethal blood extraction were employed. It's hard to comprehend that
these agonies were not just formalities, they were preliminaries. It
wasn't a question, on arriving at the prison, that an inmate would be
lucky to get out alive. He or she would be lucky to get out just
dead. A guidebook for interrogators clarified the issue: "The enemies
can't escape from torture; the only difference is whether they
receive a little or a lot."
The precise level of punishment was decided upon by Duch. If the
confession was not sufficiently elaborate, the punishment was
increased. In these situations Duch impressed upon his staff that
"kindness is misplaced". Some interrogators were more disposed to
brutality than others. And some were simply demented sadists. The
most sadistic of them all went by the name of Toy, a pitch-black
irony that his English-speaking victims were in no position to
appreciate. In recent testimony, a prison guard recalled that one of
Dewhirst's party (either the young teacher himself or the New
Zealander or Canadian travelling with him) was burned alive in the
street. The order that they be incinerated came directly from Pol Pot.
Just a few months after that grisly murder, Caldwell prepared himself
to meet the man who commissioned it. The Scotsman knew little or
nothing of Dewhirst's fate. Instead his mind was on agrarian
revolution. Caldwell believed that the world was accelerating towards
a global famine and that the answer was Developing World
self-sufficiency. But Cambodia was a strange place to test his
theory. As Professor Ian Brown notes: "This is a part of the world
that historically had not been a food-deficient area, so you wouldn't
go looking for a crisis there. Again, that seems to indicate a more
fundamental flaw in his approach: he comes at it with a theoretical
position. And therefore he'd search for an argument, not necessarily
evidence, that will sustain that."
In Pol Pot, Caldwell found someone with an argument that suited his
purposes. Pol's plan was a massive increase in rice production to
finance Cambodia's reconstruction. It required collectivisation and
slave labour, though Caldwell preferred to see the effort in terms of
spontaneous revolutionary spirit. In the event, owing to the shortage
of technicians and experts (who were killed as class enemies) and
lack of peasant support, production fell well short of targets. But
terrified of underperforming, regional commanders still sent their
designated contribution to be exported. The result was the opposite
of self-sufficiency: famine. Unable to accept the shortcomings in his
plans, Pol instead blamed spies and counter-revolutionaries, and that
meant that, in the absence of rice, spies and counter revolutionaries
had to be produced. The network of torture camps was the only area of
Democratic Kampuchea's infrastructure that met its targets.
Of these dreadful facts, Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday
morning in Phnom Penh that he was taken in a Mercedes limousine to
see Pol Pot. The setting for the meeting was the former Governor's
Palace on the waterfront, built during the French colonial period. In
a grand reception room replete with fans and billowing white
curtains, the two men sat down and discussed revolutionary economic theory.
Becker had met Pol Pot earlier the same day, and in When the War Was
Over she writes: "He was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not
handsome but attractive. His features were delicate and alert and his
smile nearly endearing."
The perennially shabby academic and the fastidious dictator must have
made for an odd couple. In any case, Caldwell left the meeting a
happy man. He returned to the guest house he was sharing with Becker
and Dudman, full of praise for Pol Pot and his political outlook. "We
went over stuff," says Becker. "He thought he had had a good
conversation. He had avoided at all costs any discussion of Vietnam.
And he was looking forward to going home."
That night they all had dinner together and afterwards Dudman went to
his room. Becker and Caldwell "stayed at the table to have our last
argument about Cambodia". He took the longer view and said that the
revolution deserved support. She, on the contrary, was even more
convinced of the refugees' testimonies. "That night," she writes,
"Caldwell tried once more to get me to change my mind."
Becker went to bed at 11pm and was woken a few hours later by the
sound of what she took to be dustbins. Coming to her senses, she
realised there were no dustbins in Phnom Penh. What she had heard was
gunfire. She opened her bedroom door to see a young man pointing a
pistol at her. He was wearing two bands of ammunition and carrying an
automatic rifle over his shoulder. She begged him not to shoot and
locked herself in her bathroom.
Meanwhile Dudman had woken up and, looking out of his window, saw a
file of men running along the street. He knocked on Caldwell's door.
The two men spoke briefly and then a heavily armed man approached.
The man shot at the floor and Dudman ran into his room. Two shots
were fired through his door. The two Americans remained hiding in
their rooms for the next hour before an aide arrived and told Becker
to stay where she was. Almost another hour passed before she was
allowed to come out. Caldwell, she was told, had been shot. He was dead.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) are
located in a large, purpose-built court on the dusty outskirts of
Phnom Penh. During the course of last year, hundreds of Cambodians
made the trip out from the city and in from the countryside to bear
witness to a long-overdue reckoning.
The lone defendant in the trial is a slim, well-preserved 67-year-old
with small, sensitive eyes. With his thick grey hair and concentrated
expression, he looks like a sprightly grandfather, a little stiff and
formal, but sufficiently attuned to the contemporary world as to be
smartly dressed in a Ralph Lauren shirt or, on another occasion, a
cream cashmere roll-neck sweater. A giant bullet-proof glass screen
divides the court from the auditorium, where 500 or more people sit
watching the proceedings. Centre stage is Duch (pronounced "Doik" in
Khmer), seated with his back to the audience. To his left is a bank
of lawyers, and behind them in the corner the relatives of victims.
In front of the defendant sit the judges, on an imposing two-tier
stand. Ten years, some 400 staff, a dozen judges, a battery of
international lawyers, an ongoing legal wrangle, and many millions of
pounds is what it has taken to put Duch on trial.
Following Caldwell's murder, four guards assigned to the tourist's
protection team were arrested and taken to S-21. Owing to the
importance of their alleged crime, the commandant of the prison was
instructed to head their interrogation. So the stories of Caldwell
and Duch came together at the inevitable point of a torture camp.
Here, amid bestial squalor, is where the liberation dream ended.
Two of the "confessions" made by guards referred to in their S-21
files as "the Contemptible Met" and "the Contemptible Chhaan",
outline a baroque conspiracy involving many other people. The
Contemptible Chhaan gives an explanation for the murder: "First, we
were attacking to ruin the Party's policy, to prevent the Party from
gathering friends in the world
And in attacking the guests on this
occasion, we would not attack them all. It would be enough to attack
the English guest, because the English guest had written in support
of our Party and the Kampuchean people for a long period of time
already
Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this
English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it."
Whether this was yet another example of innocent men implicating
other innocent men, it's impossible to know. Certainly there must
have been some kind of in-house involvement, as the guests were
guarded. But who instructed the guards, and why they did so, remains
a subject of speculation. Some argue that the Vietnamese were behind
the killing, others that it was a function of an internal party struggle.
Caldwell's brother, David, wrote a letter to the Guardian, expressing
his belief that "Mal" had "discovered the truth about the Pol Pot
regime" but "dared not admit this to either Becker or Dudman". This
seems unlikely. David Chandler told me that he once met the
translator of the meeting between Caldwell and Pol Pot, who
remembered a very pleasant exchange conducted in a spirit of
enthusiastic agreement. If that anecdote suggests Caldwell died a
dedicated Pol Potist, it tells us little about Pol, a man for whom
the word "inscrutable" might have been invented. As his deputy, Ieng
Sary, later recalled: "Pol Pot, even when he was very angry, you
could never tell. His face
his face was always smooth. He never used
bad language. You could not tell from his face what he was feeling.
Many people misunderstood that he would smile his unruffled smile,
and then they would be taken away and executed."
But why would he seek international support by killing one of his few
remaining friends from abroad? It makes no sense. "Don't apply
rational thinking to the situation," Becker cautions. "It was crazy.
Crazy. Malcolm's murder was no less rational than the tens of
thousands of other murders." The journalist Wilfred Burchett claimed
to have seen a Cambodian report not long after Caldwell's death,
which stated that he "was murdered by members of the National
Security Force personnel on the instructions of the Pol Pot
government". Burchett theorised that Caldwell had changed his mind
about the regime, but all the available evidence indicates otherwise.
In the end, Becker's conclusion seems to be the most satisfactory:
"Malcolm Caldwell's death was caused by the madness of the regime he
openly admired."
The confessions of Caldwell's alleged killers were completed on 5
January 1979. Either that day or the following one, the four men were
bayoneted to death in the prison itself. They were very possibly the
last killings to take place at S-21. On 7 January, the Vietnamese
army arrived in Phnom Penh, and Pol Pot and his associates fled into
the jungle.
The contrast between the care taken to observe Duch's legal and human
rights and the indifference with which he dispatched his victims is
lost on no one. But as Philippe Canonne, one of the lawyers
representing the relatives of the victims, said of the urge to
inflict on Duch what he had meted out to his prisoners: "We must give
voice to this sentiment, but then have the strength to transcend it."
It's this sort of resolution that has made the trial a legal landmark
in a nation that has had little experience of the rule of law. That
it was ever staged at all is a major accomplishment. For 20 years
after the Vietnamese invasion, Duch lived at liberty. At first he
followed the bulk of the Khmer Rouge into exile on the border with
Thailand. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the US and China refused
to accept the Vietnamese puppet government installed in Phnom Penh.
In a shameful version of the principle that my enemy's enemy is my
friend, they instead persuaded the UN to recognise a coalition
resistance movement, of which the Khmer Rouge formed the major
player. Thus Pol Pot was afforded the support of China, the
protection of Thailand, and the indirect recognition of the United States.
For two decades the Khmer Rouge waged guerrilla warfare against the
government in Phnom Penh. Then, in 1997, Pol Pot was placed under
house arrest by his fellow Khmers Rouges. He died peacefully in his
sleep on 15 April 1998. A year later the photojournalist Nic Dunlop
found Duch working for a Christian relief agency. An interview was
duly published and Duch handed himself in to the Phnom Penh authorities.
In theory, the trial is a joint effort between the UN and Cambodia,
but the effort has been all the UN's. The Cambodian People's Party,
which has ruled since Pol Pot was overthrown, is led by onetime Khmer
Rouge members who, under threat of purging, had defected to Vietnam.
One of these is Hun Sen, a former revolutionary soldier, who has been
prime minister since 1985. His government was accused by Amnesty
International of widespread torture of political prisoners, using
"electric shock, hot irons and near suffocation with plastic bags".
And for many years, senior former members of Pol Pot's government
lived under protection in Cambodia, some with family links to the
government. So there were several reasons why a major trial with
international media coverage was potentially embarrassing or inconvenient.
After much pressure, in November 2007 the Cambodians finally arrested
the four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders: Nuon Chea, Ieng
Sary, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan. Their trial is scheduled to
start in 2011, though few observers will be surprised if it is
indefinitely delayed. All of them claim ignorance of any wrong-doing.
Perhaps the most galling example is a long letter of evasion and
self-justification that Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's chief ideologue,
wrote to Cambodian newspapers in 2001. "I do not see any importance
in bringing up this tragic past. We would be better off to let
everyone be at peace so that all of us can carry on our daily tasks
I tried my best for the sake of our nation's survival, so that we
might enjoy development and prosperity like other nations. I am so
surprised that this turned out to be mass murder."
In one form or another, this exculpation has been used over and again
by the supporters of communist revolutions, from the Russian via the
Chinese through to the Cambodian. Each new manifestation commanded
the fervent advocacy of a new generation of radicals. Sooner or later
the grim reality was revealed, which, paradoxically, only raised the
hope that the next version would get it right. As the French
philosopher Jean-François Revel has remarked: "Utopia is not under
the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to
allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not."
Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist
terror has never been firmly established in the way, for instance,
that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz.
As if to illustrate the point, earlier last year the ECCC announced
that Helen Jarvis, its chief of public affairs, was to become head of
the victims unit, responsible for dealing with the survivors, and
relatives of the dead, of S-21.
Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the
region, who was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a
member of the Leninist Party Faction in Australia. In 2006 she signed
a party letter that included this passage: "We too are Marxists and
believe that 'the ends justify the means'. But for the means to be
justifiable, the ends must also be held to account. In time of
revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes
become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their
state agencies we don't respect their laws and their fake moral principles."
Jarvis refused to speak to me about these matters. But Knut
Rosandhaug, the UN's deputy administrator for the tribunal, said that
the administration "fully supports" her. In this sense, although she
was never a Pol Potist herself, Jarvis shows that the spirit of
Malcolm Caldwell has survived the last century. It lives on in the
conviction that the ends justify the means, and in the manner that
liberal institutions can house the most illiberal outlooks.
The means, of course, always become the ends. Duch or someone like
him is the method and the madness, the process and the final product.
At least the man himself claims to grasp what continues to elude too
many who should by now know better. In his deposition to the court,
he said: "I clearly understand that any theory or ideology which
mentions love for the people in a class-based concept is definitely
driving us into endless tragedy and misery."
The following day, his lawyer, Kar Savuth, asked that Duch be
acquitted and set free.
Caldwell didn't trouble himself with the means in Cambodia. He was
too focused on an imaginary end, which meant that he never glimpsed
the deadly real one approaching.
"He may have been starry eyed," says John Cox. "But we all do that.
Even my local football team I support long after they've been
destroyed match after match. It's a human failing."
A few days after Caldwell's murder, a testimonial was published in
the Guardian.
"Caldwell," the writer said, "was an irreplaceable teacher and
comrade whose work will undoubtedly suffer the customary fate of
being better appreciated after his death."
As it turned out, history has forgotten Caldwell. But the amiable
apologist for tyranny should be remembered, if only so that we don't
forget history.
.
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