Too Many Beads
Pell, Eve
Holocaust THE QUALITY OF MERCY by William Shawcross Simon and Schuster. 464 pp. $19.95. One day in November 1979 I stood with Henry Kamm of The New York Times along a refugee camp fence in...
...He says the refugees hadn't "the slightest idea who this person in the white dress was, nor what this fantastic new invasion could mean...
...The United States was not helpful...
...What does she want...
...the other was to feed and house several hundred thousand Cambodian refugees on both sides of the Thai border...
...Oxfam and the ICRC, followed quickly by UNICEF, were the first organizations in 1979 to spring into action, when famine appeared to threaten Cambodia...
...At the same time, more and more refugees appeared along the Thai border, and the Thai military government began trucking the Cambodians back into Cambodia...
...Some have criticized Shawcross for being too long-winded in his account of the bureaucratic chains that weighed down Cambodian aid...
...One was to get food, medicines, and clothes into Cambodia itself...
...There were, and are, plenty of problems...
...He makes his theme clear by describing his boyhood memories of the Jewish Holocaust, as recorded on old phonograph records by his father, who was the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials...
...and Western embassy files...
...Nor did the Vietnamese and Heng Samrin permit monitoring of aid distribution, just as they made delivery by air and ship difficult...
...The U.N...
...I think he has written a fascinating book...
...The agencies tried...
...The Red Cross and UNICEF were left with their fundamental principles of impartiality and nondiscrimination...
...None of this is too hopeful, save for the fact that the Cambodians are alive rather than dead...
...This excellent book is a case history in civilization's failure...
...Eventually, U.N...
...Similarly, the Khmer Rouge— and their supporters, Thailand, China, and implicitly the United States—opposed the Vietnamese regime in Cambodia and feared aid would fall into Vietnamese hands, as it probably did...
...Shawcross suggests that just possibly the Cambodians were not starving to death in 1975, as the media hype led millions to believe...
...A young man, a refugee, approached us and asked in French, "Who is that woman...
...Shawcross concludes that many of the institutions he describes were established from the "darkness" of World War II...
...He visited Cambodia in the fall of 1980 and Vietnam and Cambodia in the spring of 1981, but was not then allowed a visa to return to either country again until the fall of 1983, when his book was nearly finished...
...civil servant, Robert Jackson, to impose order on an operation which by 1980 involved five international agencies, sixty voluntary agencies, and at least sixty governments...
...Cambodian food production made a limited comeback...
...Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim called on a longtime British and U.S...
...Unlike the Carter Administration," says Shawcross, "that of President Reagan did not seem anxious to fulfill the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act...
...I disagree...
...By the time the Western powers, principally the United States, had leaned on the Thais to stop dumping Cambodians back into their hungry country, two basic operations were under way...
...Shawcross has documented this tragedy meticulously, digging out the bureaucratic tangles from U.N...
...The Vietnamese and their Cambodian puppet, Heng Samrin, didn't want any help to go to the border refugees for fear that much of the aid would fall into the hands of the Khmer Rouge...
...Shawcross credits them for trying...
...But the border fighting goes on, suppression within Cambodia goes on, and the hundreds of thousands of refugees along the border still have no place to go—neither home nor a third country for resettlement...
...They are man-made, and are therefore imperfect____We have no cause for complacence...
...Shawcross could have written a similar book about dozens of other places, including Iraq-Iran, El Salvador, Israel-Lebanon, Angola-Namibia-South Africa, Ethiopia-Somalia, or East Timor...
...One day in November 1979 I stood with Henry Kamm of The New York Times along a refugee camp fence in eastern Thailand as First Lady Rosalynn Carter, her coterie, and a group of media people swept by...
...William Steif (William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, reports frequently from various parts of the worldfor The Progressive...
...The Quality of Mercy makes that clear...
...So a "land bridge" into the border area was out of the question...
...agencies, performed their job of "mercy...
...The Thai military was restrained...
...They were under extraordinary pressures from all parties involved, which meant the superpowers, the European powers, and most of Southeast Asia's nations...
...In The Quality of Mercy, William Shawcross describes Rosalynn Carter's visit to the Sa Kaeo camp as "bizarre," and he is quite right, down to the "herd of about 150 reporters, photographers, and camera crews, pushing and kicking each other and even refugees to get closer to the President's wife...
...But he agrees the Khmer Rouge perpetrated genocide—a holocaust—on Cambodia and goes out of his way to castigate "the Western Left," and especially Noam Chomsky, for seeing only what Chomsky called a "vast and unprecedented" propaganda campaign against the Khmer Rouge...
...Border Relief Operation, which used supplies from the World Food Program of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization...
...Jackson emerges as the hero of The Quality of Mercy, if there is a hero, because he gradually brought the agencies under control, coordinated their work, and seems to have upgraded their staffs...
...High Commissioner for Refugees took over more and more of the border role through a new entity called the U.N...
...Shawcross has shown the "humanitarian" side of the story: how private agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam), together with the super-national U.N...
...But they were caught up in political intrigues, bureaucracy, rivalries, and they got little help from the intended beneficiaries of their mercy...
...Shawcross's main theme is the difficulty of providing Cambodian aid...
...Those institutions are designed to rescue us from our own frailty, to bind the self-inflicted wounds of the world...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
