If this inaccessibility is a feature of most genocide, Cambodia was perhaps the most extreme case. The Khmer Rouge may well have run the most secretive regime of the twentieth century. They sealed the country completely. “Only through secrecy,” a senior KR official said, could the KR “win victory over the enemy who cannot find out who is who.”56 When Pol Pot emerged formally as KR leader in September 1977, journalists hypothesized out loud about his identity. “Some say he is a former laborer on a French rubber plantation, of Vietnamese origin,”AFP reported. “Others say he is actually Nuong Suon, a onetime journalist on a Communist newspaper who was arrested by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s.”57 When Pol Pot’s photo was released by a Chinese photo news agency, analysts noted that he bore a “marked resemblance” to Saloth Sar, the former Communist Party secretary-general. The resemblance was of course not coincidental.58
The KR did have a voice. They spurred on their cadres over the radio, proclaiming, “The enemy must be utterly crushed”; “What is infected must be cut out”; “What is too long must be shortened and made the right length.”59 The broadcasts were translated daily by the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, but they were euphemisms followed by the KR’s glowing claims about the “joyous” planting of the rainy season rice crop, the end of corruption, and the countrywide campaign to repair U.S. bomb damage.
In the United States, the typical editorial neglect of a country of no pressing national concern was compounded exponentially by the “Southeast Asia fatigue” that pervaded newsrooms in the aftermath of Vietnam. The horde of American journalists who had descended on the region while U.S. troops were deployed in Vietnam dwindled. Only the three major U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—retained staff correspondents in Bangkok, Thailand, and they were tasked with coveringVietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (known as VLCs, or “very lost causes”) as well. As soon as U.S. troops returned home, the American public’s appetite for news from the region shrank. Journalists who did publish stories tended to focus on the Vietnamese boat people and the fate of American POWs and stay-behinds. Responsible for such broad patches of territory, they were slow to travel to the Thai-Cambodian border to hear secondhand tales of terror.60 Those who did make the trip found that many of the Cambodian refugees had experienced terrible suffering, hunger, and repression, but few had witnessed massacres with their own eyes. Soon after seizing the capital, the KR had hastily erected a barbed-wire barrier to prevent crossing into Aranyaprathet, Thailand, and had laid mines all along the border. The Cambodians with the gravest stories to tell were, by definition, dead or still trapped inside the country. U.S. officials estimated that only one in five who attempted to reach Thailand survived.
The dropoff in U.S. press coverage of Cambodia was dramatic. During Cambodia’s civil war between 1970 and 1975, while the United States was still actively engaged in Southeast Asia, the Washington Post and New York Times had published more than 700 stories on Cambodia each year. In the single month of April 1975, when the KR approached Phnom Penh, the two papers ran a combined 272 stories on Cambodia. But in December 1975, after foreigners had left, that figure plummeted to eight stories altogether.61 In the entire year of 1976, while the Khmer Rouge went about destroying its populace, the two papers published a combined 126 stories; in 1977 they ran 118.62 And these figures actually exaggerate the extent of American attention to the plight of Cambodians. Most of the stories in this period were short, appeared in the back of the international news section, and focused on the geopolitical ramification of Cambodia’s Communist rule rather than on the suffering of Cambodians. Only two or three stories a year focused on the human rights situation under the Khmer Rouge.63 In July 1975 the Times ran a powerful editorial asking “what, if anything” the outside world could do “to alter the genocidal policies” and “barbarous cruelty” of the KR. The editorial argued that U.S. officials who had rightly criticized Lon Nol now had a “special obligation to speak up,” as “silence certainly will not move” Pol Pot.64 But the same editorial board that called on the United States to break the silence did not itself speak again on the subject for another three years.
Cambodia received even less play on television. Between April and June 1975, when one might have expected curiosity to be high, the three major networks combined gave Cambodia just under two and a half minutes of airtime. During the entire three and a half years of KR rule, the network devoted less than sixty minutes to Cambodia, which averaged less than thirty seconds per month per network. ABC carried one human rights story about Cambodia in 1976 and did not return to the subject for two years.65
American editors and producers were simply not interested, and in the absence of photographs, video images, personal narratives that could grab readers’ or viewers’ attention, or public protests in the United States about the outrages, they were unlikely to become interested. Of course, the public was unlikely to become outraged if the horrors were not reported.
Plausible Deniability: “Propaganda, the Fear of Propaganda, and the Excuse of Propaganda”
Some of the guilt that Americans might have had over ignoring the terror behind KR lines was eased by a vocal group of atrocity skeptics who questioned the authenticity of refugee claims. They were skeptical for many of the usual reasons. They clung to the few public statements of senior KR officials, who consistently refuted bloodbath claims and confirmed observers’ hopes that only the elite from the last regime had reason to fear. “You should not believe the refugees who came to Thailand,” said Ieng Sary, deputy premier in charge of foreign affairs, in November 1975, while visiting Bangkok, “because these people have committed crimes.” He urged the refugees in Thailand to return to Cambodia, where they would be welcomed.66 In September 1977 Pol Pot said in Phnom Penh that “only the smallest possible number” out of the “1 or 2 percent” of Cambodians who opposed the revolution had been “eradicated.” Conceding some killings gave the KR a greater credibility than if they had denied atrocities outright, and many observers were taken in by these concessions.67
Another factor that blunted understanding of the evil of the regime was that many Cambodians died of starvation and malnutrition, which outsiders associated with “natural” economic and climatic forces. This probably helped obscure the human causes of the disaster. In addition, refugees who told horror stories were presumed to be affiliated with the old regime. International relief workers in Thailand were said to be politically motivated as well because many were funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development or were thought to be anti-Communist.68
Leading voices on the American left, a constituency that in other circumstances might have been the most prone to shame the U.S. government into at least denouncing the KR, ridiculed the early atrocity claims as conservative “mythmaking.” They pursued the speculative bloodbath debate that had preceded the KR victory with even greater ferocity. The directors of the antiwar Indochina Resource Center, George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, released a study in September 1975 that challenged claims that the evacuation of Phnom Penh had been an “atrocity” causing famine. Instead they said it was a response to Cambodians’ “urgent and fundamental needs” and “it was carried out only after careful planning for provision of food, water, rest and medical care.” 69 The following year they published the widely read Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Without ever having visited the country, they rejected atrocity reports. The city evacuations, they argued, would improve the welfare of Cambodians, whose livelihoods had been devastated by the Nixon years. They were convinced that American and European media, governments, and anti-Communists were colluding to exaggerate KR sins for Cold War propaganda purposes. This account was read widely at the State Department and received backing from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who, in an article in the Nation, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” praised Hildebrand and Porter. As the title of