The debate was highly charged, as blistering condemnations of the old and new regimes were traded across the floor. Although the majority of the speakers supported the U.S. and Chinese view that Vietnam’s invasion should not be recognized, none contested the atrocities committed by Pol Pot. Indeed, all were quick to preface their support for maintaining recognition of the KR with disclaimers that they “held no brief” for the Pol Pot regime, “did not condone their human rights record,” and “did not excuse their abominable crimes.” Their votes to seat the KR government, they stressed, “did not mean agreement with the past policies of its leaders.”167
The United States carried Rosenstock’s arguments from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly. “For three years,” U.S. representative Richard Petree said, “we have been in the forefront of international efforts to effect fundamental changes in these practices and policies by peaceful means.” In the absence of a “superior claim,” however, the regime seated by the previous General Assembly should be seated again.168 Moral values were at stake—a commitment to peace, stability, order, and the rule of law, as well as the insistence that states carry out their obligations under the UN charter. The UN charter had made non-interference in sovereign states a sacred principle. No doctrine of humanitarian intervention had yet emerged to challenge it.
Most of the arguments made by those who voted for seating the KR were internally contradictory. They first insisted that recognizing the Vietnamese-installed regime would mean condoning external intervention and licensing foreign invasions by big powers into small states, thus making the world a “more dangerous place.” Yet they next claimed that maintaining recognition of the Pol Pot government would not mean condoning genocide or licensing dictators elsewhere to believe they could treat their citizens as abusively as they chose.
Nonetheless, the U.S. position prevailed. The first debate of many, on September 21, 1979, lasted six and a half hours, and the assembly voted 71–35 (34 abstentions, 12 absences) to endorse the Credentials Committee resolution. The KR’s Khieu Samphan was quoted later on the front page of the Washington Post, saying, “This is a just and clear-sighted stand, and we thank the U.S. warmly.”169
Although it would take years for Pol Pot to enter the ranks of the maniacs of our century, where he is ritually placed now, even by 1979 many grasped the depth of his terror. Those who visited were able to tour Tuol Sleng, witness the skeletal remains that lay stubbornly scattered throughout the country, tabulate death counts, and speak with their Cambodian friends, who would often simply burst into tears without a moment’s notice. Rosenstock remembers, “I realized enough at the time to feel that there was something disgusting about shaking Ieng Sary’s hand. I wasn’t in the habit of comparing myself to Pontius Pilate. I mean, I felt like throwing up when the guy shoved his hand in my face. Oooh, it was awful.” Yet not so awful as to cause him or his more senior colleagues to challenge U.S. policy, which was driven by U.S. distaste for Vietnam and its interest in pleasing China.
Even with the 1979 vote behind the United States, the presence of KR officials at the UN continued to upset many Americans. In advance of the Credentials Committee vote in 1980, ten U.S. senators signed a letter calling for the United States to abstain on the vote in order to “stand apart from both” brutal regimes. A Washington Post editorial urged the United States to hold the seat open, as nothing about the U.S. policy of recognizing the KR was working. “Geopolitically, it has brought the United States no evident gains,” the editorial said. “Politically, it has been used by Hanoi to justify both its support of Heng Samrin and its suspicion of U.N. relief efforts. Morally, it is beyond characterization.”170 A subsequent editorial, entitled “Hold-Your-Nose Diplomacy,” noted, “There are many close calls in foreign policy, but this is not one of them.”171Yet no American lobby really pressed the empty-seat solution and, on the other side of the issue, the five ambassadors from the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines) urged the White House to stand its ground. In an effort to win support for the Khmer Rouge claim to the UN seat, they also held a secret meeting with members of the House Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee.172 After a brief period of suspense, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie announced that since Vietnam continued to refuse to withdraw from Cambodia, the United States would again support the seating of Pol Pot’s government. He stressed that the U.S. decision “in no way implies any support or recognition” of the Khmer Rouge regime. “We abhor and condemn the regime’s human rights record,” Muskie said.173 The General Assembly voted 74–35, with 32 abstentions. By the following year, the debate over whether to recognize the KR had become pro forma.174
In 1982, under ASEAN pressure, the Khmer Rouge joined in a formal coalition that included the non-Communist forces, the so-called National Army of Sihanouk, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front under Son Sann. This coalition shared the UN seat. At the request of the United States, China supplied Sihanouk and Son Sann with arms, and in 1982 the United States began to provide nonlethal covert assistance. Estimated initially at $5 million a year, this funding grew to $12 million by 1985, when Congress authorized up to $5 million in overt aid.
The Khmer Rouge coalition continued to occupy the UN seat as its guerrillas battled the Heng Samrin regime from the countryside. KR tactics changed little. KR soldiers captured and executed foreign tourists and inflicted terror upon those Cambodians who had the misfortune to live under KR control.175 The consequences of international recognition were significant. The legitimate KR coalition received international financial and humanitarian support, whereas the illegitimate Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh was treated like a pariah. The Cambodian people who had so recently been isolated by the paranoid KR were now isolated by the United States and its allies.176
Ignoring all the evidence available in Cambodia and their commitments to punish genocide, UN member states continued to refuse to invoke the genocide convention to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice against the Cambodian government. Indeed, official UN bodies still refrained even from condemning the genocide. Only in 1985 were bureaucratic inertia and political divides briefly overcome so that a UN investigation could finally be conducted. By then, because it had emerged that the Khmer Rouge had killed huge percentages of Muslim Chams, Buddhist monks, and Vietnamese as such, it proved relatively easy to show that the regime was guilty of genocide against distinct ethnic, national, and religious groups. Once the UN chair of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities had thoroughly documented the crimes, the 1985 final report described the atrocities as “the most serious that had occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.” The subcommission noted that the horrors were carried out against political enemies as well as ethnic and religious minorities but found that this did not disqualify the use of the term “genocide.” Indeed, in the words of Ben Whitaker, the UN special rapporteur on genocide, the KR had carried out genocide “even under the most restricted definition.”177
Yet nothing changed as a result of the declaration. The Khmer Rouge flag continued to fly outside the United Nations, and KR foreign minister Ieng Sary continued to represent Cambodia at the UN as if the KR terror had never happened. Only with the thawing of the Cold War and the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to former arch-enemy China in May 1989 did Cambodia cease to be a pawn on the superpowers’ chessboard. With the Chinese and the Soviets no longer interested in fighting a proxy war through the KR and the Vietnamese, the United States had no reason to maintain support for the KR. Not until July 1990 did Secretary of State James Baker write a letter to Senate majority leader George Mitchell laying out a new U.S. policy toward the KR at the UN. Henceforth, the United States would vote against the KR coalition at the United Nations and at last support the flow of humanitarian aid into Vietnam and Cambodia.178 Still, during negotiations in Paris aimed at brokering a peace deal among the rival factions, the United States sided with China and the KR in opposing the