by MIKE HEAD
A historic whitewash lies at the heart of the trials of former leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime currently underway in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.
Convened three decades after the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge reign of terror and mass murder, the UN-orchestrated proceedings are designed to bury the underlying responsibility for the Cambodian catastrophe—above all, that of United States imperialism. Washington laid waste to Cambodia during the Vietnam War, in which three million Vietnamese were killed.
Standing trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) are four Khmer Rouge leaders charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the absence of Pol Pot, the top Khmer Rouge leader who died in 1998, the prosecution is intended to make them exclusively culpable for one of the most chilling chapters of the twentieth century.
In the first phase of the trial, they are charged with the forced movement of people from urban areas to the countryside during which an estimated one million Cambodians were executed and a similar number died from starvation, disease and overwork.
To this day, Pol Pot’s regime is routinely labelled by the mass media as “communist.” There could be no more grotesque distortion. The Khmer Rouge was a product of the suppression of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the late 1920s and the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Pol Pot and his followers emerged out of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, which pursued Stalinism’s reactionary nationalist program of “socialism in one country.”
…
Faced with a country in ruins, and unwilling to feed the cities, the Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of the entire urban population to undertake virtual slave labour in the countryside. This was a profoundly anti-working class regime.
As the “killing fields” terror unfolded, Washington shifted its support behind the Khmer Rouge as a means of combating Vietnamese influence. Attacks on ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia triggered a Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, which installed a breakaway Khmer Rouge faction commanded by Hun Sen, who remains the prime minister of Cambodia.
In response, US President Jimmy Carter’s administration tacitly backed a massive Chinese military assault on Vietnam and worked with China to supply Pol Pot’s insurgents with arms. Washington regarded Pol Pot as a valuable Cold War ally against Vietnam. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, later admitted: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot… Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”
World Socialist Web Site for more