The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience

...The task is not how to arouse the Western conscience, but to reverse the process which has reduced its influenccaround the world...

...It is preferable to die from famine rather than to receive poisoned assistance...

...The problem, however, is really the twentieth century, which cannot at this late date be repealed...

...Small wonder that Cambodian issues remained on the back burner in Washington until 1978, when it was no longer possible to ignore what was happening there...

...Almost instantly the United Nations was faced with two Cambodian governments, one supported by China, the other by Vietnam and the Soviet Union...

...He squarely takes on Khmer Rouge apologists like Noam Chomsky, the Indochina Resource Center, and the American Friends Service Committee...

...His anti-Americanism has now been largely reduced to the person of Zbrgniew Brzezinski (for his allegedly anti-Soviet, pro-Chinese views) and the Reagan Administration books in one...

...When representatives of both appeared in New York, each to claim its legitimacy from the Security Council, U.S...

...The Americans he likes best, of course, are those diplomats, relief workers, and international civil servants who implicitly accept his own thesis of guilt for the Cambodian holocaust and work to ameliorate its consequences...

...The Quality of Mercy deals with events in Indochina since the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime by a North Vietnamese invasion in 1978, with particular attention to attempts by international relief organizations to stave off famine and the final extinction of the Cambodian people...

...Doctors and technicians from the Eastern bloc and some from Western Europe were self-indulgent and insensitive to the plight of the Cambodians, and some saw their expedition as an opportunity to feather their own nests...

...As Hung Sen, foreign minister of the pro-Vietnamese regime in Phnom Penh, repeatedly claimed, "Our people would prefer to eat grass or to die rather than to share aid with Pol Pot...

...One was even-horror of horrors-anti-Communist...

...And normalization of relations with China, which President Carter regarded as one of his most important foreign policy tasks, tended to temper the administration's indignation over Peking's continued support for remnants of the Pol Pot regime, who persisted in redoubts along the Thai border...

...The Americans had withdrawn, and the blood bath long predicted by the Nixon Administration proceeded to occur without delay...

...At the same time, they were disturbed by the prospect of Cambodian refugees spilling over into their own country, making a claim upon resources which they did not have-or did not wish to give...

...The United States was not the only party immobilized by conflicting agendas...

...THE QUALITY OF MERCY: CAMBODIA, HOLOCAUST AND MODERN CONSCIENCE William Shawcross/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Mark Falcoff The Quality of Mercy is really three (for purportedly exploiting the Indochina aftermath for its own ideological purposes, for its anti-Communism, but above all for its assertion that the United States is basically a just and decent world power...

...Since he has learned so much since Sideshow, one dares hope his next book will address this issue in a more direct and useful fashion.rect and useful fashion...

...As such, they naturally had mixed feelings about the puppet regime that Hanoi had installed in Phnom Penh...

...If everyone is guilty, as the saying goes, then no one really is...

...It is a very different sort of book...

...He admits that the problem may be one of "compassion fatigue'-too many Biafras or Cambodias a bit too often...

...And the third is a philosophical treatise on the role of modern conscience in dealing with catastrophes in far-off countries...

...The Thais were not anxious to see Vietnamese influence increase in Cambodia, since they had long regarded the Khmers as a political and cultural buffer between them and their stronger neighbors...

...So wide, in fact, that a superficial reader might conclude that The Quality of Mercy is really an exercise in damage limitation...

...But the prize for moral corruption should really go to the Cambodian leaders themselves...

...Most of the UN subsidiaries which dealt with the issue were obsessed with the notion that the United States would be the chief ideological and political beneficiary of the Cambodian holocaust, an eventuality (to them) so awful as to render almost everything else-including helping its victims-a matter of secondary concern...

...and finally, that the latter's subsequent genocidal conduct was somehow a logical and inevitable consequence of earlier U.S...

...The independent relief organizations had to wend their way in this thicket of private agendas, and some did so with greater success than others...

...In this particular case, however, the effect is to diffuse blame for recent events in Cambodia along a very wide front of responsibility...

...This is the conclusion which Shawcross does not reach, though his book positively overflows with data to support it...

...These people are the real heroes of the book-always keeping the needs of famine victims uppermost in their minds, but forced to recompute the moral calculus of their operations on a daily basis...

...policy- became the current wisdom of several editorial seasons, finding endorsement, among other places, between the expensive whiskey advertisements of the New Yorker magazine...

...Entitled Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia, it quickly became an international best-seller, and its central thesis-that the United States had "destabilized" the neutral government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk...

...One can't have it both ways: Between Shawcross's earlier enthusiasm for Marxist revolutionaries, and the holocaust whose existence he now deplores, there lies a straight and narrow line...

...As such, one may even be permitted to doubt that some of the reviewers who have showered it with such excessive praise have actually read it from start to finish...

...Nonetheless, in his treatment of international relief activities, he is not slow to blame the Vietnamese for placing most of the obstacles in the way of those in the West who would have alleviated the agony of the Khmer people...

...The second is an exploration of the role of international felief organizations, with particular attention to the bureaucratic and political snags which prevent them from achieving maximum effectiveness...

...The Thai government is depicted as corrupt and self-seeking, determined to obtain a proper .rake-off of the resources intended for the Cambodians...

...An April 1975 the Communist Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia, and unleashed a sustained campaign of terror which concluded in the physical elimination of at least one-quarter of that tiny country's population...

...This leads directly to Shawcross's third and final theme, which is that in spite of elaborate structures intended to deal with famine around the world, Westerners are actually becoming less sensitive to the human plight of people they have never seen...

...He suggests as well that attention tends to shift too rapidly from one area to the other, so that the institutional energies needed to see a crisis to satisfactory conclusion are shifted before they can make their fullest impact...

...there are also some interesting asides (not sufficiently piquant for my taste) on the deficiencies of UN organizations and bodies, particularly its Human Rights Commission...

...For the Carter Administration, of course, almost everything that had happened in Cambodia after 1975 was an unpleasant surprise...

...The collapse of the Lon Nol government in Cambodia and its replacement by a cabal of genocidal Marxists (mostly French-trained) offered the North Vietnamese a historic opportunity to reassert hegemony over a region long regarded (by them) as within their own cultural and political sphere of influence...

...Nonetheless, the issues it raises are not insignificant...

...that the U.S.-Vietnamese military incursion into Cambodia in 1970 had unleashed a reaction whose ultimate consequence was the Khmer Rouge...

...The first is a study of the local conflicts in Indochina which feed on ancient rivalries, but also have implications for present-day great power alignments...

...Its characteristic features are media overload and cognitive confusion, an international political system in which ideology is the most important (indeed, for some countries, the only) product, and a decolonization process which has left approximately two-thirds of the countries of the world in hands of elites self-evidently more selfish, evil, and incompetent than the European colonizers they replaced-more than that: than the Westernized "conservatives" who ruled them during their initial period of independence...

...But they achieved much more than the UN agencies to which sanctimonious Western liberals prefer to consign most nasty tasks in the Third World...

...Four years later, British journalist William Shawcross published a book whose sole purpose was to place the blame for this horrendous event squarely at the door of the United States government...

...He now recognizes that ideology has something to do with politics: He even admits some connection between Marxism-Leninism and the conduct of Pol Pot's exterminators...

...representative Andrew Young could only exclaim, "I dare say this is as interesting a session as we have had for some time...

...Whereas Sideshow was intended as a bill of indictment, The Quality of Mercy is a study in the multiple complexities of international politics...

...These were the harsh realities with which international relief organizations had to deal...

...He wishes that politics could be removed altogether from the practice of international humanitarian relief...

...It would be unfair, however, not to credit this new Shawcross with some very significant improvements...

...Some of these organizations were American, particularly those which were most munificently financed and most doggedly effective...

...The Vietnamese, who supposedly were not even interested in the early reunification of their own country, immediately revealed the startling extent of their territorial ambitions...

...UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim is shown to be mainly concerned with his re-election, studiously avoiding any decision which could offend either the Soviets or the Chinese...

...To put it bluntly, The Quality of Mercy is a very boring book...

...The Soviets and their allies naturally wanted to strengthen the government in Phnom Penh, and this put them in the enviable position of being able to denounce Pol Pot and the United States-all in the same breath...

...In Shawcross's telling, the story is one which reflects little credit on most of the actors...

...Shawcross does not integrate the three themes very systematically, so that- although his style is lucid enough-the strands tend to become hopelessly entangled...

...In a writer whose entire history until now has been one of relentless special pleading this should, I suppose, be welcomed as a sign of progress...

...Don't we all...