Accomplices to a New Genocide : Cambodia: Our Department of State, which acquiesced in the Holocaust, has cultivated another monstrosity in backing the Khmer Rouge.

Once upon a time, in Europe, Jews were being slaughtered.

The United States was at war with the murderers, the government of Nazi Germany. As one might expect, the United States maintained that its policy was to work out programs to save those European Jews who could be saved.

History now records that this was not true. On the contrary, during half the war the Department of State actually used the machinery of government to sabotage the rescue of Jews. Only in early 1944, when Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau, himself a Jew, went to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a memo describing the Department of State’s actions, was the situation reversed. The memo was titled “On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” By then, it was too late.

How come? It was an amalgam of racism, bureaucratic inertia and geopolitics that produced this situation.

And it is happening again today. Not to the Jews but to the Cambodians. The Cambodian nazis, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, are coming back after one holocaust with a second in mind if they can overthrow the Hun Sen government. Pol Pot’s Defense Minister, Son Sen, has a little list, which he has already read to some people. Those to be slaughtered include not just ethnic Vietnamese among the 6 million people living in Cambodia, but also Cambodian “fellow-travelers” of the Vietnamese. This would cover everyone who, now or later, is deemed to disagree with Pol Pot, who is still in command and who usd this tactic in his earlier genocide, in the period 1975-78, when more than 2 million Cambodians died.

Today, the Department of State is not only acquiescing in the repeat of genocide but is helping to make to happen. Anti-Semitism has been replaced by anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Bureaucratic inertia is unchanged. And the geopolitics is one of support for the government of China, currently the largest suppressor of freedom on Earth today.

Here is the indictment.

1) Not only has the Department of State made no substantial effort to prevent the return of the Khmer Rouge but it has worked actively and energetically to force the Vietnamese Army out of Cambodia, thus removing the main bulwark of the Cambodian people against the return of the Khmer Rouge.

2) Not only has the Department of State failed to oppose Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge but it has strengthened it politically by working to combine the non-communist resistance in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge in a so-called Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. Meanwhile, militarily, it has worked secretly, in conjunction with the CIA, to help the Khmer Rouge’s two allies, Son Sann and Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in their three-way combined effort to stretch Hun Sen’s forces ever thinner in the ongoing fighting.

3) Not only has the Department of State failed to support peaceful initiatives of the Thai government to end the conflict but it has actively tried to sabotage those initiatives by intervening in Thai politics against the prime minister.

4) Not only has the Department of State failed to support Hun Sen’s government against the Khmer Rouge but it is the main element in an economic embargo that denies Cambodia help from the West.

5) Not only has the Department of State failed to prevent Pol Pot’s government of Democratic Kampuchea from holding Cambodia’s U.N. seat, it has--for 10 years and still today--supported the Khmer Rouge’s retaining U.N. representation.

6) Not only has the Department of State failed to protest China’s support of the Khmer Rouge publicly, but it has worked closely with China’s ally in Southeast Asia, Singapore, in advancing China’s insidious campaign to insert the Khmer Rouge into a new government coalition in Cambodia.

7) Not only has the Department of State failed to implement the U.S. signature on the genocide convention by moving to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice but it has used its vote at international conferences to prevent this charge from being leveled against them.

8) The Department of State has hidden its knowledge that Sihanouk is far too unstable to be the “indispensable leader” of Cambodia that the department represents him to be. And it has smeared, by action and inaction, the present government of Cambodia and, in particular, prevented its representatives from traveling here to make their case, even to private U.S. groups.

9) Not least, Department of State representatives avoid exchanges of views with their critics so as to maintain a more defensible “low profile” than discussion would permit.

At at recent meeting on Capitol Hill, a senior department representative had this to say to some who disagreed: “You only want a win for the Vietnamese.” This statement reveals quite a bit. America’s actions are caught up in a geopolitical hostility toward Vietnam that is every bit as tangible as the racism that embarrassed, for all time, the Department of State of Secretary Cordell Hull.