Pol Pot's legacy
Pfaff, William
he two million or so murders for which Pol Pot and his movement were responsible in Cambodia were inspired by a desire to surpass in revolutionary zeal the Chinese cultural revolution, so...
...Bishop Gerardi was no stranger to violence and repression...
...All were meant as "messages" to Hanoi, Beijing, or Moscow...
...It went on to become the main threat to the American-supported government...
...From 1973 on," Arnold Isaacs wrote in his 1983 book Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, "Cambodia seemed an entire country gone amok...
...That act of international illegality is described by William Bundy, who was at the time a supporter of the Vietnam War, as "indeed a black page in the history of American foreign policy...
...This is in Bundy's forthcoming history of American policy under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, A Tangled Web [Hill and Wang...
...When he publicly presented the report, Bishop Gerardi said that REHMI was "a painful denunciation that challenges each one of us to commit ourselves to action so that those abominable acts never happen again...
...It described the deaths of 55,000 Guatemalans, 75 percent of whom were Mayan...
...acceptance by the army, the government, and other armed units of full responsibility for the atrocities and human-rights violations they committed...
...Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, who was flanked by the papal nuncio and the president of the Guatemalan Bishops Conference as be began the funeral rites, appeared almost numbed by the brutal murder of his auxiliary bishop...
...The invasion proved futile: The North Vietnamese shifted their supply trails even deeper into Cambodia, whose new rulers were as incapable of stopping them as Prince Sihanouk had been...
...The Communist group Pol Pot joined on his return to Cambodia was a negligible force in the country's politics...
...and appointment of international observers to monitor the peace process...
...American bombing of Cambodia was resumed in 1973, not because of anything the Cambodians had done, but as "punishment" for North Vietnamese violations of the peace agreement that had been signed by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in Paris in January...
...Hanoi developed routes inside Cambodia's frontiers to transport arms and supplies southward to the Viet Cong...
...An assailant struck him on the head with a block of concrete and then dragged the bishop inside the garage where he pulverized his skull beyond recognition...
...In 1988 his fellow bishops selected him as one of their representatives on the Committee on National Reconciliation...
...reform of the army to curtail its political and social influence and to restore civilian control...
...revamping the judicial system...
...Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, believed that international communism was a structured and disciplined movement, and that the Vietnam War could be ended by intimidating Moscow and Beijing...
...The Cambodian victims of American actions were killed for a purpose that had nothing directly to do with Cambodia...
...He is Khieu Samphan...
...He declared "that the Commonweal 9 May22,1998...
...The investigation focused on the most egregious assassinations and massacres, which accounted for only a fraction of the total number killed during the conflict...
...In the spring of 1972, North Vietnam launched a major offensive into South Vietnam, moving its forces out of frontier Cambodia, which left space for the Khmer Rouge to expand its influence...
...This time it was accomplished under the impulsion and with the complicity of the Vietnamese people, whom they have always hated and feared, under the influence of the Chinese, their overpowering neighbor, and under punishment from an American government, which as Bundy makes plain, had among its members absolutely no one who knew anything about Cambodia's society or history--or cared...
...Subsequently the Nixon administration lent its approval to a military coup which overturned the neutralist government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and installed a military dictatorship...
...It did not begin to prosper until Cambodia was swept toward the Vietnam War by North Vietnam's exploitation of Cambodian military weakness and the country's policy of neutrality with respect to that war...
...In the subsequent struggle, China backed Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, while North Vietnam supported a less radical Communist faction...
...In 1970 the United States and South Vietnam invaded Cambodia...
...REHMI was a church-sponsored effort to recover the historical memory of the victims of the worst repression during the armed conflict in Guatemala...
...The funeral liturgy began promptly at 10 A.M...
...The previous Friday in the very cathedral where he is now interred, Bishop Gerardi presented the findings of the Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica (REHMI) project which he directed and coordinated...
...The report indicted the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary spin-offs for 85 percent of those killings...
...All this produced a terrifying synthesis of forces...
...What happened in Cambodia between the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, and the Vietnamese invasion that stopped the Khmer Rouge terror in December 1978, had happened before...
...As bishop of E1 Quiche, he had escaped two assassination attempts before being forced to leave the country in 1980 for exile in Costa Rica...
...All its psychological anchors were ripped loose in the hurricane of violence which had fallen upon it...
...In 1969 the United States began secretly to bomb those routes...
...The principal author of the ideology, which he developed in the thesis he presented at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, is still alive, in the Cambodian forest...
...with a procession of hundreds of concelebrants, including twenty-five bishops representing the Episcopal Conferences of Canada, Mexico, the United States, and the countries of Latin and Central America...
...c) 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate Stephen Privett GUATEMALA REPORT A bishop-martyr is buried housands of Guatemalans watched on Wednesday, April 29, as the casket of Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was carried through the massive front doors of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City...
...he two million or so murders for which Pol Pot and his movement were responsible in Cambodia were inspired by a desire to surpass in revolutionary zeal the Chinese cultural revolution, so as to cleanse Cambodia of "all sorts of depraved cultures and social blemishes...
...The bishop had been murdered at approximately 10 o'clock on Sunday evening as he stepped from his car to open the garage door...
...resolution of long-standing land ownership inequities...
...The recommendations included: economic and psychological restitution for victims' families...
...In addition to its historical findings, the report called for major changes to support the peace process...
...He returned four years later as auxiliary bishop and vicar general of Guatemala City...
...American decisions and American bombs had helped destroy peacetime Cambodian life, and it is in that sense that some connection can be said to exist between American actions and the savagery of the Khmer Rouge...
...Eighty thouCommonweal 8 May 22, 1998 sand tons of bombs were dropped on the country during four months, until Congress forced the Nixon administration to stop...
...In the late 1980s he worked to establish the Archdiocesan Office of Human Rights before assuming responsibility for REHMI in 1995...
...A naive ideological vision of agrarian utopia, stripped of urban and bourgeois influences, was responsible for this genocidal program...
...It had been worked up in student leftist circles in Paris after World War II, and adopted by the man who later renamed himself Pol Pot...
...The study took three years and involved 600 investigators who used fifteen Mayan languages to speak with more than 6,500 witnesses...
...It took more than half an hour for the whiterobed clergy to make their way through the crowds into the cathedral, down the aisle past the open casket of Bishop Gerardi, and into the sanctuary...
...Norodom Sihanouk has himself said that "several times in the past, the Khmer people, who built Angkor, have demonstrated a morbid desire for mutual self-destruction...
...According to Bundy, who was a CIA and State Department official in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the bombing was intended "above all as a demonstration to the Soviet Union that [President Nixon] was indeed capable of extreme and irrational response...
...The American bombing campaign in 1969 had not primarily been meant to affect the military situation...
...From the twelfth century forward-after the immense temple complex of Angkor was built--a series of cataclysmic defensive and civil wars occurred in Cambodia that ended in ruined cities and partition of the country between Thais and Vietnamese...
...The secret was kept from the American public, and from all but two or three senators, trusted by President Richard Nixon...
...Destruction delivered with impunity from abroad awakened a native capacity for suicidal catharsis and renewal, provided by the ideologues of the Khmer Rouge...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
