Be Careful Which Graves We Exhume

Every once in a while a relatively marginal fact, if properly appreciated, can illuminate a broader truth. So it is with the recent announcement that the U.S. government will seek to establish an international war crimes tribunal for the two high-level Khmer Rouge officials who recently emerged from their jungle redoubt near the Cambodian-Thai border.

No doubt the fact that such international tribunals are already established to deal with the great uglinesses of Rwanda and Bosnia means to many that there is nothing odd about a replication for Cambodia, whose past depredations certainly seem to qualify it for inclusion in such a category. But it is odd for three reasons.

First, while the horrors of Rwanda pitted Hutus against Tutsis, and those of Bosnia Serbs, Croats and Bosnia Muslims all against one another, the atrocities of Cambodia represented instead a nearly pure political and ideological madness, not an ethnic or religious one.

For this reason, the application of the term genocide to what happened in Cambodia between 1974 and 1979 is improper, no matter how commonplace it has become. Genocide, properly understood, is the attempt by one people to exterminate another, discernibly different, people, whether different on ethnic or religious grounds.

If there was a genocide in Cambodia, it was a sui-genocide--a phenomenon recognizable in this century at any level only in communist countries--Cambodia, China and the Soviet Union. Not even the Nazis made a point of deliberately murdering fellow Germans. This is the truest measure of the sickness that was Leninism--that it amounted to mass political cannibalism. It was the fullest expression of the socialist idea that, niceties aside, is based on envy and demands endless social leveling to sate that envy. Leninism militarized this basic impulse, and the Maoism evident in Cambodia ruralized it. The phenomenon of communist revolutions eating their own is simply Cain killing Abel over and over and over again to the point of fathomlessness.

But a false analog having to do with mass murder isn’t the only thing peculiar about the recent American government announcement.

The starkest question is a simpler one: What business is the fate of two aged and defeated killers--Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea--to the U.S. government? Did any American perish at the hands of these deranged thugs? Who gave the sitting U.S. administration a right to insist on legal proceedings with respect to another sovereign state?

To presume such a right is consistent with much recent American pontificating. Our government sounds these days like the mother-in-law of the world, with an opinion and point of view about everything. Has no one in the upper reaches of the Clinton administration ever heard Bismarck’s counsel, that “it is unworthy of a great state to dispute over something which does not concern its own interests”?

This is not just bad diplomatic etiquette. It also reflects an attitude defining the administration’s delusions of historical grandeur--namely, that we live in “the American moment” in international history. According to the present stewards of U.S. foreign policy, “globalization” defines the benign, transformative marriage of American power and values in the world as a whole. We have become not only the “indispensable nation,” as the secretary of state so loves to say, but, in our own eyes at least, a power so uniquely benign that we arrogate to ourselves the right both to make the rules of international order and to excuse ourselves from being bound by them.

Thus has evolved an unwitting double standard wherein we find it natural to insinuate ourselves into the affairs of others but cannot imagine others doing the same in ours.

Such hubris more often than not carries with it an unwitting form of racism. Implicit in the proposal for an international tribunal to deal with Cambodia’s historical travails is the assumption that Cambodians are incapable of conducting their affairs. Not only is this assumption untrue, it is destructive. For years, Cambodia’s problems have been compounded by its various factions trying to trick and tease foreigners into coming to their exclusive aid. To continue this practice is to further infantilize Cambodian politics, and we should take no part in it.

The final reason why the American pronouncement is strange is that it is liable to dredge up no little amount of embarrassment about the American role in recent Cambodian history. One need not accept the “sideshow” thesis--that everything that has transpired in Cambodia since the days of Lon Nol is the fault of the U.S.--to recognize that we were indeed there at the creation of Cambodia’s recent troubles. For purely prudential reasons, then, a U.S. initiative aimed at exhuming our own policy ancestor, so to speak, seems very ill-advised.